When I was a chain smoker, I used to wake up and the first thing I'd do was reach for a cigarette, basically. And now I do the same thing for a smartphone, basically.

I am neurotic, and I'm a worrier.

Man the lifeboats. The idiots are winning.

I think more and more people became aware that social media was starting to feel like a more toxic space. And, I mean - quite a lot of incidents of people getting very, very angry about all kinds of things and attacking people.

Your grades are not your destiny: they're just letters and numbers which rate how well you performed in one artificial arena, once.

I grew up in the countryside . But there's a danger of us romanticizing that. Because when I was a kid in 1982, that's what my parents were saying to me about television and comics and computer games!

The internet's perfect for all manner of things, but productive discussion ain't one of them. It provides scant room for debate and infinite opportunities for fruitless point-scoring: the heady combination of perceived anonymity, gestated responses, random heckling and a notional “live audience” quickly conspire to create a “perfect storm” of perpetual bickering.