I love the feeling of being anonymous in a city I've never been before.

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

To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.

Science has been quite embattled. It's the most important thing there is. An arts graduate is not going to fix global warming. They may do other valuable things, but they are not going to fix the planet or cure cancer or get rid of malaria.

The great failure in education, much of the time, is the lack of excitement and stimulus

Isn´t it strange how wealth is always wasted on the rich?

We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls.