People in this world of superficial communication find themselves isolated and lonely and have difficult in talking about personal things that really matter to them.

The British have turned their sense of humour into a national virtue. It is odd, because through much of history, humour has been considered cheap, and laughter something for the lower orders. But British aristocrats didn't care a damn about what people thought of them, so they made humour acceptable.

The English reputation for humour is a way by which people avoid revealing themselves and have superficial relationships, so that you can engage in banter without making yourself vulnerable.

Conversation is a meeting of minds with different memories and habits. When minds meet, they don't just exchange facts: they transform them, reshape them, draw different implications from them, engage in new trains of thought. Conversation doesn't just reshuffle the cards: it creates new cards.

Never before have humans been so ambitious, have they thought that they could be much more than their parents were.

One of the great ambitions is to discover the diversity of the world, to discover who inhabits the world.

Art is, nowadays, our new religion and museums are our cathedrals.