Life just wants to be; but it doesn't want to be much.

In my day, the principal concerns of university students were sex, smoking dope, rioting and learning. Learning was something you did only when the first three weren't available.

South Dakota... is like the world's first drive-through sensory deprivation chamber.

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.

Very little of what America does is actually bad, and I don't think it ever does anything anywhere that is intentionally bad. I mean, sometimes we make mistakes and bad judgments and kind of back the wrong regimes and things, but by and large what America does is really good.

I had always thought that once you grew up you could do anything you wanted - stay up all night or eat ice-cream straight out of the container.

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.