Pick up a sunflower and count the florets running into its centre, or count the spiral scales of a pine cone or a pineapple, running from its bottom up its sides to the top, and you will find an extraordinary truth: recurring numbers, ratios and proportions.

You know, Darwin said through natural selection things go gradually, and he was talking about pigeon's evolution or horses evolving, getting faster. But in fact if you look at evolution on a bigger scale, cosmic evolution and you look at culture evolution you see it jumps, it goes through phase changes, and that's very exciting.

It's a mark of any icon that it should be open to iconoclasm.

I've been a lucky man. I've only faced one real tragedy: the death of my wife, Maggie, from cancer in 1995.

What is the most interesting thing to people? Other people.

Beautiful people are always with us, as evolutionary psychologists and a trip to the news-stand confirm.

A placebo is a phony cure that works. This is very hard for the medical profession to get their teeth around because they hate placebos, but scientifically, placebos work in about 30% of cases that are psychogenic diseases.