Am I living in a simulation?

If technology is a drug – and it does feel like a drug – then what, precisely, are the side-effects?

The biggest teenage taboo is being strait-laced. It's easy to tell a researcher you went to a house party that turned into an orgy. It's less easy to say you like eating toast and watching QI.

My theory is that we used to have several personalities, and now we're encouraged to have one online.

Man the lifeboats. The idiots are winning.

That's not something that we've gone in thinking 'Right! How are we going to examine that now?' It's just when you take a step back you see that they're actually all sort of in that mode.

Whenever anything nice happens in the world I always expect something appalling to happen immediately afterwards.

I'm actually quite pro-technology, but I'm a worrier, so I like to envision worst-case scenarios.

Technology by default became the thing that was a new thing that had swept in and was altering it everything.

The iPad falls between two stools - not quite a laptop, not quite a smartphone. In other words, it's the spork of the electronic consumer goods world.

In summary, our world is doomed.

But are they heroes or mere dreamers?

All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams.

I have two speeds. Fast and faster. I don't just run. I take it.

Nothing is more likely to destroy a species or a nation than a determination to survive at all costs

There is enough oil in the ground to deep-fry the lot of us, and no obvious means to prevail upon governments and industry to leave it in the ground.

I never knew I lacked so much confidence until I met you

I don't have a sense of time. Time is timeless to me, and I'm not in a hurry to get older. I mean, if I were worried about time, all the time, it would be terrible.

Contradictory strands create an essay that's richly ambivalent.

I must admit I’m impressed, Sadie. You controlled your magic and controlled Isis. And you, Carter, did well turning into a lizard.

Going to LSU was the right move for me. It taught me to be independent.