Madam: If you discover any more comets, can you not wait until they are announced by the proper authorities?

Until very recently, the heavenly bodies have been investigated only with reference to their position and their laws of motion, and a quarter of a century ago astronomy was little more than celestial topography.

Madam: If you discover any more comets, can you not wait until they are announced by the proper authorities?

I had planned to accomplish something considerable, and this is the end.

I think it is important to be a friend to your kids. But it is also equally important to set boundaries. My mother was a strong influence, and so was my dad. My mom was my friend whom I couldn't cross.

The Americans love me because I'm so completely unwilling to change my whole Britishness.

Even though people spend more of their waking hours at work than anywhere else, people underestimate how work influences their overall wellbeing and daily experience.

I want to turn the clock back to when people lived in small villages and took care of each other.

It's funny, because in deference to conventional wisdom, I spent my struggling writer years trying to suppress my naturally baroque literary voice and write clean, spare prose. I finally gave up and embraced my baroque tendencies when I wrote the Kushiel series.

I'm the prime minister who removed 400 checkpoints, barriers, road-blocks and so on to facilitate the growth of the Palestinian economy.

The life purpose of the true social entrepreneur is to change the world.

If you're a content brand, you have to be in every place your audience is. Sometimes your audience is on the couch and wants to watch a 30-minute show, and sometimes they're checking their Facebook feed and want to see something that's only a minute long.

The best bands kept making records and had this evolution, where by the end, by their commercial phase or sellout phase, the records are from outer space.

How fantastic that the American ingenuity of NASA scientists got us to Mars. It makes me proud to be an American. I can't get enough of these images from when the probe touched down. These scientists are American heroes.

I was never argued out of faith; it was much more passive than that - and I wasn't argued back in, either.

Once you've published a few books, you drag around this ball and chain of a back list. All the evidence of how few you've sold is there. I think a lot of writers my age have this strange experience of going from would-be to has-been.

When revising, consider whether you have written anything that will hurt or offend a member of your immediate family. If the answer is no, go back and add something.

My first love was, and remains, manual labor; sowing and harvesting, the pastures, the flock, and the cattle.

In those days, it didn't take much imagination to come up with something that required great lyric development skills. You just thought of an experience that you might have gone through, and write it down.

While the laughter of joy is in full harmony with our deeper life, the laughter of amusement should be kept apart from it. The danger is too great of thus learning to look at solemn things in a spirit of mockery, and to seek in them opportunities for exercising wit.

I've heard some people say that I'm selling out, but I'm not. If I hadn't done 'Black Radio', and just kept on doing just piano trio stuff, I wouldn't be honest with myself; I'd be doing it to please other people. That would be selling out.

I'm wondering whether to have someone go around with my mobile to completely throw everybody off the scent. I could appear in weird places.

Clarity and consistency are not enough: the quest for truth requires humility and effort.

For me, the Beatles are proof of the existence of God.

The personality problem is so tough when you're not able to pay people. It's bad enough when you can pay people, but, when you have people working for free, often their motivation is diminished considerably.

If I got too famous, I'd just quit acting, but I think it's highly unlikely I'm going to get really famous.

I think it reflects well on the state of animation that people are knowledgeable about it and love the fantasy and imagination that goes into it.

Beginning under the Roman Empire, intellectual leadership in the West had been provided by Christianity. In the middle ages, who invented the first universities - in Paris, Oxford, Cambridge? The church.