Use your imagination and you'll see that even the most narrow, humdrum lives are infinite in scope if you examine them with enough care.

The one thing you have to do if you write a book is put yourself in someone else's shoes. The reader's shoes. You've got to entertain them.

Science and literature give me answers. And they ask me questions I will never be able to answer.

I could invent another world. I'm not terribly keen on this one.

Being clever was when you looked at how things were and used the evidence to work out something new.

... 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.

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.