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

I hadn't realized quite how extraordinary Charles Lindbergh's achievement was in flying the Atlantic alone. He had never flown over open water before, but he flew straight to Dingle Bay in Ireland and then on to Paris, exactly as planned.

Boston's freeway system is insane. It was clearly designed by a person who had spent his childhood crashing toy trains.

My favourite fellow of the Royal Society is the Reverend Thomas Bayes, an obscure 18th-century Kent clergyman and a brilliant mathematician who devised a complex equation known as the Bayes theorem, which can be used to work out probability distributions. It had no practical application in his lifetime, but today, thanks to computers, is routinely used in the modelling of climate change, astrophysics and stock-market analysis.

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

Four times I was honked at for having the temerity to proceed through town without the benefit of metal.

There are three stages in scientific discovery. First, people deny that it is true, then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person.