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.

From an evolutionary point of view, sex is really just a reward mechanism to encourage us to pass on our genetic material.

Where I grew up, in Des Moines, Iowa, there is hardly any downtown economic activity now. Everybody shops in malls - you don't find a sense of community in malls.

Everywhere throughout New England you find old, tumbledown field walls, often in the middle of the deepest, most settled- looking woods- a reminder of just how swiftly nature reclaims the land in America.

Language is more fashion than science, and matters of usage, spelling and pronunciation tend to wander around like hemlines.

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.

Most big companies don't like you very much, except hotels, airlines and Microsoft, which don't like you at all.