The average Southerner has the speech patterns of someone slipping in and out of consciousness. I can change my shoes and socks faster than most people in Mississippi can speak a sentence.

When you consider it from a human perspective, and clearly it would be difficult for us to do otherwise, life is an odd thing. It couldn't wait to get going, but then, having gotten going, it seemed in very little hurry to move on.

If you were designing an organism to look after life in our lonely cosmos, to monitor where it is going and keep a record of where it has been, you wouldn't choose human beings for the job. But here's an extrememly salient point: we have been chosen, by fate or Providence or whatever you wish to call it. As far as we can tell, we are the best there is. We may be all there is. It's an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe's supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously.

My first rule of consumerism is never to buy anything you can't make your children carry.

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.

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

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.