Imagination without skill gives us contemporary art.

I don't write at the library, because I smoke when I work or would like the possibility of a smoke. Also, I need to be at my own desk.

From principles is derived probability, but truth or certainty is obtained only from facts.

Real data is messy. ...It's all very noisy out there. Very hard to spot the tune. Like a piano in the next room, it's playing your song, but unfortunately it's out of whack, some of the strings are missing, and the pianist is tone deaf and drunk- I mean, the noise! Impossible!

It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing.... A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It's the best possible time of being alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.

The whole notion of journalism being an institution whose fundamental purpose is to educate and inform and even, one might say, elevate, has altered under commercial pressure, perhaps, into a different kind of purpose, which is to divert and distract and entertain.

If you took away everything in the world that had to be invented, there'd be nothing left except a lot of people getting rained on.