We journalists make it a point to know very little about an extremely wide variety of topics; this is how we stay objective.

We journalists... are also extremely impressed with scientists, and we will, frankly, print just about any wacky thing they tell us, especially if it involves outer space.

In my experience, you run into trouble when you ask a group of beer-drinking men to perform any task more complex than remembering not to light the filter ends of cigarettes.

The only really good place to buy lumber is at a store where the lumber has already been cut and attached together in the form of furniture finished and put inside boxes.

Albert Einstein, who discovered that a tiny amount of mass is equal to a huge amount of energy, which explains why, as Einstein himself so eloquently put it in a famous 1939 speech to the Physics Department at Princeton, 'You have to exercise for a week to work off the thigh fat from a single Snickers.'

I love the resource of the Internet. I use it all the time. Anything I'm writing - for example, if I'm writing a scene about Washington D.C. and I want to know where this monument is, I can find it right away, I can get a picture of the monument, it just makes your life so much easier, especially if you're writing fiction. You can check stuff so much quicker, and I think that's all great for writers.

The method (of learning Japanese) recommended by experts is to be born as a Japanese baby and raised by a Japanese family, in Japan. And even then it's not easy.