I do not tell lies. Mother used to say that this was because I was a good person. But it is not because I am a good person. It is because I do not tell lie.

...and I wrote a book and that means I can do anything

I thought Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything was remarkable. Managing to be entertaining while still delivering all that hard science was a pretty good trick to pull off.

I think the U.K. is too small to write about from within it and still make it seem foreign and exotic and interesting.

When I was 13 or 14, I started devouring novels; literature took quite a while to take me over, but it caught up just in time to save me from becoming a mathematician.

Bore children, and they stop reading. There's no room for self-indulgence or showing off or setting the scene.

I have very fond memories of swimming in Walden Pond when we lived in Boston. You'd swim past a log and see all these turtles sunning themselves. Slightly disturbing if you thought about how many more were swimming around your toes, but also rather wonderful.