I was born too late for steam trains and a lazy eye meant I'd never be an astronaut.

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

And it occurred to him that there were two parts to being a better person. One part was thinking about other people. The other part was not giving a toss what other people thought.

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 one of the things you have to learn if you're going to create believable characters is never to make generalizations about groups of people.

... He had always rather liked emergencies. Other people's at any rate. They put your own problems into perspective. It was like being on a ferry. You didn't have to think about what you had to do or where you had to go for the next few hours. It was all laid out for you.

As a kid, I didn't read a great deal of fiction, and I've forgotten most of what I did read.