Clearly, some time ago makers and consumers of American junk food passed jointly through some kind of sensibility barrier in the endless quest for new taste sensations. Now they are a little like those desperate junkies who have tried every known drug and are finally reduced to mainlining toilet bowl cleanser in an effort to get still higher.

... it occurred to me that never again would he be seven years, one month and six days old, so we had better catch these moments while we can.

You can be a scientist and believe in god: the two can go hand in hand.

When you tell an Iowan a joke, you can see a kind of race going on between his brain and his expression.

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.

Britain still has the most reliably beautiful countryside of anywhere in the world. I would hate to be part of the generation that allowed that to be lost.

The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can't quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don't altogether know, filled with matter we can't identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don’t truly understand.