I have never played the lottery in my life and never will. Voltaire described lotteries as a tax on stupidity. More specifically, I think, on innumeracy.

37 is a lumpy number, a bit like porridge. Six is very small and dark and cold, and whenever I was little trying to understand what sadness is I would imagine myself inside a number six and having that experience of cold and darkness. Similarly, number four is a shy number.

I have never played the lottery in my life and never will. Voltaire described lotteries as a tax on stupidity. More specifically, I think, on innumeracy.

When I multiply numbers together, I see two shapes. The image starts to change and evolve, and a third shape emerges. That's the answer. It's mental imagery. It's like maths without having to think.

We will always have more to discover, more to invent, more to understand and that's much closer to art and literature than any science.

Aesthetic judgments, rather than abstract reasoning, guide and shape the process by which we all come to know what we know.

There is no such thing as an average person. They really are guidelines for people to grapple with the unknown, and we can always surprise expectations.