...and the Universe, ... will explode later for your pleasure.

We live in strange times. We also live in strange places: each in a universe of our own. The people with whom we populate our universes are the shadows of whole other universes intersecting with our own. Being able to glance out into this bewildering complexity of infinite recursion and say things like, 'Oh, hi, Ed! Nice tan. How's Carol?' involves a great deal of filtering skill for which all conscious entities have eventually to develop a capacity in order to protect themselves from the contemplation of the chaos through which they seethe and tumble.

I always thought something was fundamentally wrong with the universe

When people you greatly admire appear to be thinking deep thoughts, they probably are thinking about lunch.

I'm 48, which is a bit of a shock to me. Why only last year I thought I was a precocious young thing!

The hardest assumption to challenge is the one you don't even know you are making.

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.