I was heading to Nebraska. Now there's a sentence you don't want to say too often if you can possibly help it.

It is not as if farming brought a great improvement in living standards either. A typical hunter-gatherer enjoyed a more varied diet and consumed more protein and calories than settled people, and took in five times as much viatmin C as the average person today.

English grammar is so complex and confusing for the one very simple reason that its rules and terminology are based on Latin, a language with which it has precious little in common.

Every kid I knew had a father with a little stash of men's magazines which the father thought was secret and which the kid knew all about.

America is a great disappointment to me. As I said in one of my books, other societies create civilisations; we build shopping malls.

... it occurred to me that never again would he be seven years, one month and six days old, so we had better catch these moments while we can.

Disassemble the cells of a sponge (by passing them through a sieve, for instance), then dump them into a solution, and they will find their way back together and build themselves into a sponge again. You can do this to them over and over, and they will doggedly reassemble because, like you and me and every other living thing, they have one overwhelming impulse: to continue to be.