And I find chopsticks frankly distressing. Am I alone in thinking it odd that a people ingenious enough to invent paper, gunpowder, kites and any number of other useful objects, and who have a noble history extending back 3,000 years haven't yet worked out that a pair of knitting needles is no way to capture food?

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.

Everything seems to be designed for the benefit of the automobile and not the benefit of the human being.

America is a great disappointment to me. As I said in one of my books, other societies create civilisations; we build shopping malls.

Because we humans are big and clever enough to produce and utilize antibiotics and disinfectants, it is easy to convince ourselves that we have banished bacteria to the fringes of existence. Don't you believe it. Bacteria may not build cities or have interesting social lives, but they will be here when the Sun explodes. This is their planet, and we are on it only because they allow us to be.

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.

In a funny way, nothing makes you feel more like a native of your own country than to live where nearly everyone is not.