All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others.

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing noise they make as they go by.

What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that's really the essence of programming. By the time you've sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you've learned something about it yourself... The teacher usually learns more than the pupils. Isn't that true?

She had what it took: great hair, a profound understanding of strategic lip gloss, the intelligence to understand the world and a tiny secret interior deadness which meant she didn’t care.

To give real service you must add something which cannot be bought or measured with money, and that is sincerity and integrity.

It was none the less a perfectly ordinary horse, such as convergent evolution has produced in many of the places that life is to be found. They have always understood a great deal more than they let on. It is difficult to be sat on all day, every day, by some other creature, without forming an opinion about them.

Fifteen years was a long time to be stranded anywhere, particularly somewhere as mind-boggingly dull as Earth.