The best that can be said for Norwegian television is that it gives you the sensation of a coma without the worry and inconvenience.

It isn't easy to become a fossil. ... Only about one bone in a billion, it is thought, becomes fossilized. If that is so, it means that the complete fossil legacy of all the Americans alive today - that's 270 million people with 206 bones each - will only be about 50 bones, one-quarter of a complete skeleton. That's not to say, of course, that any of these bones will ever actually be found.

Traveling makes you realize what an immeasurably nice place much of America could be if only people possessed the same instinct for preservation as they do in Europe.

I have long known that it is part of God's plan for me to spend a little time with each of the most stupid people on earth.

America is a very seductive place in terms of lifestyle and comfort, but it wasn't for me.

A world without newspapers or a world where the newspapers are purely electronic and you read them on a screen is not a very appealing world.

Entirely incidentally, a little-known fact about Shakespeare is that his father moved to Stratford-upon-Avon from a nearby village shortly before his son's birth. Had he not done so, the Bard of Avon would instead be known as the rather less ringing Bard of Snitterfield.