The biggest teenage taboo is being strait-laced. It's easy to tell a researcher you went to a house party that turned into an orgy. It's less easy to say you like eating toast and watching QI.

I could worry that I'm going to bleed to death, you know, from cutting my finger on a sandwich packet, you know, if I sort of open a sandwich.

[My parents when I was a kid] would go, "It's a nice hot day. Why are you inside watching the TV?" And you go, "Well, 'cause it's better?"

Most writers or performers walk around with the notion in their head that - a paranoid worry that maybe people don't like them.

You sort of perform your personality, I guess, to everyone on some level.

Many people find bald, unvarnished truths so disturbing, they prefer to ram their heads in the sand and start dreaming at the first sign of scientific reality.

The difference between smartphones and cigarettes is this: a cigarette robs 10 minutes from your lifespan, but at least has the decency to wait and withdraw all that time in bulk as you near the end of your life - whereas a smartphone steals your time in the present moment, by degrees. Five minutes here. Five minutes there. Then you look up and you're 85 years old.