Writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful.

Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.

Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.

I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings.

It seems to me that I have always existed and that I possess memories that date back to the Pharaohs.

Stupidity is something unshakable; nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it; it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant.

Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.

A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier.

I tried to discover, in the rumor of forests and waves, words that other men could not hear, and I pricked up my ears to listen to the revelation of their harmony.

There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it

To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.

Hope because the universe hears you.Hope because the universe works for you.Hope because the universe speaks to you.Hope because the universe will finish what it began in you.

I killed the Google Alert I used to have on myself two years ago. I don’t need any more information about myself. I get more than enough of that just by being me.

Only cells that had been transformed by a virus or a genetic mutation had the potential to become immortal.

I'd lose my mind if I heard my kid call the nanny Mommy.

I never walked out the door and said, "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the fairest Baldwin brother of them all?"

I'd had my daughter when I was a teenager - I took my daughter to college with me.

I am away so much, so I rarely see live TV, but I use iPlayer to catch programmes.

In the end, the key ingredient for public life is imagination. You imagine something better, you try to bring the people with you.

Most humans feel the transcendent temptation, the emotional drive to festoon the universe with large-scale meaning.