I understand cricket - what's going on, the scoring - but I can't understand why.

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

I can't fix the world. If you want to make a difference in life, you have to direct your energies in a focused way.

On the dashboard of our family car is a shallow indentation about the size of a paperback book. If you are looking for somewhere to put your sunglasses or spare change, it is the obvious place, and it works extremely well, I must say, so long as the car is not actually moving. However, as soon as you put the car in motion ... everything slides off ... It can hold nothing that has not been nailed to it. So I ask you: what then is it for?

Geologists are never at a loss for paperweights.

At the foot of the mountain, the park ended and suddenly all was squalor again. I was once more struck by this strange compartmentalization that goes on in America -- a belief that no commercial activities must be allowed inside the park, but permitting unrestrained development outside, even though the landscape there may be just as outstanding. America has never quite grasped that you can live in a place without making it ugly, that beauty doesn't have to be confined behind fences, as if a national park were a sort of zoo for nature.

I see litter as part of a long continuum of anti-social behaviour.