I wanted to join Footlights, ” he says. “I wanted to be a writer-performer like the Pythons. In fact I wanted to be John Cleese and it took me some time to realise that the job was in fact taken.

I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.

A learning experience is one of those things that says, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.

All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others.

We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.

I have terrible periods of lack of confidence. I just don't believe I can do it and no evidence to the contrary will sway me from that view.

I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.

But now he felt as if the whole world were tipping backwards over his head, and this, he couldn’t help feeling, was a very worrying thing for the world to do.

Whoever holds the keys to house of knowledge, must open the door, for those who search for light of knowledge to enter.

We can only do what is possible for us to do. But still it is good to know what the impossible is.

I wake up every morning feeling lucky - which is driven by fear, no doubt, since I know it could all go away.

The things that you know intellectually when you're young become internalized as you get older. You realize all those clichés.

No man was ever eloquent by trying to be eloquent, but only by being so.

I've never made movies to reach millions of people.

I do everything I think possible or acceptable to escape from this trap.

I don't personally like the e-readers they've come up with so far. I don't fetishize books, but I do like that they're solid and unchanging.

Is this a fit time, said my father to himself, to talk of Pensions and Grenadiers?

It makes no sense to pack an auditorium with 5,000 people and then tell them to keep quiet.