I could spend my life arriving each evening in a new city.

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.

Mamma says if we stay so focused on our past failings, we won't be able to move beyond them and learn what we need to know.

Summer-induced stupidity.That was the diagnosis...

I grew up in the limelight and being the child of someone famous. So my relationship with fame is not bedazzled.

Maman used to say that you can always find something to be happy about.

The disclosure of a new fact, the leap forward, the conquest over yesterday's ignorance, is an act not of reason but of imagination, of intuition.

I'm just not arbitrarily choosing to have five guitars play one type of thing. In that way there's a definite similarity between a symphony orchestra and the 100 guitar symphony.

I have never met a grateful performer in the movies.

It's a landscape that has to be seen to be believed. And, as I say on occasion, it may have to be believed in order to be seen.

Seriously, I would go in a second. I'd be the first actor in space and I'd love to do it.

Military officers from different countries, when they meet each other, tend to sort of fall in love, become mutual admiration societies, at the expense of realities.