Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, which is a pity because this week the National Association of Beholders wrote to tell me that I've got a face like a rucksack full of dented bells.

If technology is a drug – and it does feel like a drug – then what, precisely, are the side-effects?

The biggest teenage taboo is being strait-laced. It's easy to tell a researcher you went to a house party that turned into an orgy. It's less easy to say you like eating toast and watching QI.

My theory is that we used to have several personalities, and now we're encouraged to have one online.

Man the lifeboats. The idiots are winning.

That's not something that we've gone in thinking 'Right! How are we going to examine that now?' It's just when you take a step back you see that they're actually all sort of in that mode.

Whenever anything nice happens in the world I always expect something appalling to happen immediately afterwards.

I'm actually quite pro-technology, but I'm a worrier, so I like to envision worst-case scenarios.

Technology by default became the thing that was a new thing that had swept in and was altering it everything.

The iPad falls between two stools - not quite a laptop, not quite a smartphone. In other words, it's the spork of the electronic consumer goods world.

In summary, our world is doomed.

Humility is not weakness but a quality of strength.

With any advent in technology, any technological innovation, there is the good and the bad.

But at my back I always hear Time's winged chariot hurrying near.

It is wise for us to forget our troubles, there are always new ones to replace them.

I am a restless person.

I don't enjoy killing, but when done righteously, it's just a chore, like any other.

For me cinema is image, sound, and the faces and bodies and, yes, voices, of my actors, and sometimes the words that they are saying, but not only the words.

I used to be able to do the Chinese splits, where you open your legs sideways.

Every attempt to explain human behavior, especially the irrational, must as a matter of course end in simplification.

Any conqueror in human history has always been ultimately someone who exists purely for the expansion of their own ego, through amounting more.