Given the scale of issues like global warming and epidemic disease, we shouldn't underestimate the importance of a can-do attitude to science rather than a can't-afford-it attitude.

In future, children won't perceive the stars as mere twinkling points of light: they'll learn that each is a 'Sun', orbited by planets fully as interesting as those in our Solar system.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

It will not be humans who watch the sun's demise, six billion years from now. Any creatures that then exist will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae.

I think a few hundred years from now we'll start having the 'posthuman' era of different species.

It's better to read first rate science fiction than second rate science-it's a lot more fun, and no more likely to be wrong.

We need to broaden our sympathies both in space and time - and perceive ourselves as part of a long heritage, and stewards for an immense future.

Science is a part of culture. Indeed, it is the only truly global culture because protons and proteins are the same all over the world, and it's the one culture we can all share.

I hope that by 2050 the entire solar system will have been explored and mapped by flotillas of tiny robotic craft.

I'm not myself religious but have no wish to insult or denigrate those who are.

Crucial to science education is hands-on involvement: showing, not just telling; real experiments and field trips and not just "virtual reality".

Words are such fun!

I was once a statist, and then I researched The Holocaust. I am now a Libertarian.

Friendships in childhood are usually a matter of chance, whereas in adolescence they are most often a matter of choice.

Once you shake hands with the devil, you have to accept they are in control.

Develop a clean line of action for your leading character

Me and crazy Janey were making love in the dirt singing our birthday songs.

The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.

Music, in the best sense, does not require novelty; nay, the older it is, and the more we are accustomed to it, the greater its effect.

This is the world we live in, Gemma, for better or for worse. Make of it what you can," he says, and I pull him to me.

Design creates culture. Culture shapes values. Values determine the future.