I don't have much positive to say about motor neuron disease, but it taught me not to pity myself because others were worse off, and to get on with what I still could do. I'm happier now than before I developed the condition.

The universe is governed by science. But science tells us that we can't solve the equations, directly in the abstract.

In the last 200 years the population of our planet has grown exponentially, at a rate of 1.9% per year. If it continued at this rate, with the population doubling every 40 years, by 2600 we would all be standing literally shoulder to shoulder.

There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.

Not to take this web of dualities as a sign we are on the right track would be a bit like believing that God put fossils into the rocks in order to mislead Darwin about the evolution of life.

The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like.

Maybe I don't have the most common kind of motor neuron disease, which usually kills in two or three years.