The current best estimate for the Earth’s weight is 5.9725 billion trillion tonnes, a difference of only about 1 per cent from Cavendish’s finding.

I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything.

There are only three things that can kill a farmer: lightning, rolling over in a tractor, and old age.

If you can imagine a man having a vasectomy without anesthetic to the sound of frantic sitar-playing, you will have some idea of what popular Turkish music is like.

That's the trouble with losing your mind; by the time it's gone, it's too late to get it back.

Hunters will tell you that a moose is a wily and ferocious forest creature. Nonsense. A moose is a cow drawn by a three-year-old.

Geologists are never at a loss for paperweights.

Of all the things I am not very good at, living in the real world is perhaps the most outstanding.

Physics is really nothing more than a search for ultimate simplicity, but so far all we have is a kind of elegant messiness.

Protons give an atom its identity, electrons its personality.

Why is it, I wondered, that old people are always so self-centered and excitable? But I just smiled benignly and stood back, comforted by the thought that soon they would be dead.

Do you mean that Zane is some kind of bird magnet?

To claim that one can be happy without being free is to prove that one has no idea what happiness means.

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.

When it comes to asking for raise, you just have to do it in the right way. You may get a no, and that's fine, but ask and make sure you know when you can come back and ask again.

There ain't much future for a man who works the sea, there ain't no island left for islanders like me.

There have been a couple of jobs I've done without thinking, without being engaged, and they just stink.

Being called a 'bad citizen' is a compliment to a novelist, at least to my mind. That's exactly what we ought to do.

I had ideas first, wealth second. It only worked in that order.

I'm very moved and very excited. And it just seems to me here are houses and trees and streets that feel so different from New York. I feel very attached to London; I love it.

Usually people start with painting and then go on to make installations; my painting came from installation.