[The Head of Radio Three] had been ensnared by the Music Director of the college and a Professor of Philosophy. These two were busy explaining to the harassed man that the phrase "too much Mozart" was, given any reasonable definition of those three words, an inherently self-contradictory expression, and that any sentence which contained such a phrase would be thereby rendered meaningless and could not, consequently, be advanced as part of an argument in favour of any given programme-scheduling strategy.

Space is really big-REALLY big.

In moments of great stress, every life form that exists gives out a tiny subliminal signal.

If life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.

All you really need to know for the moment is that the universe is a lot more complicated than you might think, even if you start from a position of thinking it's pretty damn complicated in the first place.

Nobleness was one word for making a fuss about the trivial inevitabilities of life, but there were others.

I think the idea of art kills creativity.