It was an especially wonderful time to be a noisy moron.

The first book I did - the first successful book - was a kind of a travel book, and publishers in Britain encouraged me to do more.

Open your refrigerator door, and you summon forth more light than the total amount enjoyed by most households in the 18th century. The world at night, for much of history, was a very dark place, indeed.

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

When you sit in a chair, you are not actually sitting there, but levitating above it at a height of one angstrom (a hundred millionth of a centimetre), your electrons and its electrons implacably opposed to any closer intimacy.

Every dog on the face of the earth wants me dead.

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.