When you tell an Iowan a joke, you can see a kind of race going on between his brain and his expression.

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

I do find London exciting. Much as I hate to agree with that tedious old git Samuel Johnson, and despite the pompous imbecility of his famous remark about when a man is tired of London he is tired of life...I can't dispute it.

It is a curious feature of our existance that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.

I just use my life story as a kind of device on which to hang comic observations. It's not my interest or instinct to tell the world anything pertinent about myself or my family.

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

Protons give an atom its identity, electrons its personality.