He really did not care whether he survived or not, so long as it rendered him unconscious and absolved him of responsibility.

Everyone has learning difficulties, because learning to speak French or understanding relativity is difficult.

One person looks around and sees a universe created by a god who watches over its long unfurling, marking the fall of sparrows and listening to the prayers of his finest creation. Another person believes that life, in all its baroque complexity, is a chemical aberration that will briefly decorate the surface of a ball of rock spinning somewhere among a billion galaxies. And the two of them could talk for hours and find no great difference between one another, for neither set of beliefs make us kinder or wiser.

And this shows that sometimes people want to be stupid and they do not want to know the truth.

Madness doesn't happen to someone alone. Very few people have experiences that are theirs alone.

As a teenager, I was always this strange mixture of kind of vice-captain of the rugby team and sensitive artist type the rest of the time. I was sent away to this public school in the middle of nowhere, and I think we managed to completely miss out on normal youth culture.

And I know I can do this because I went to London on my own, and because I solved the mystery…and I was brave and I wrote a book and that means I can do anything.