In the U.K. I'm probably better known as a comedy writer - or certainly that's my background is in writing comedy.

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.

A word is not the same with one writer as it is with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.

Poems are made by fools like me But only God can make a tree.

I only have one note, let's be honest. But I'll play a different version of that one note.

Virtue is no empty echo.

It doesn't take a majority to make a rebellion; it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound cause.

Most people are sick. But only a few know that this is something they can be proud of. These are the psychoanalysts.

To be brave is to love unconditionally without expecting anything in return.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but chains and whips excite me.

I think songwriting is the ultimate form of being able to make anything that happens in your life productive.

Allah is al-Kareem, so if He withholds from you it is not on account of stinginess. It is on account of His generosity. He withholds to give.