Japanese maps tend to come in two varieties: small, schematic, and bewildering; and large, fantastically detailed, and bewildering.

A whole bunch of big technological shocks occurred when Asian innovations - paper, gunpowder, the stirrup, the moldboard plow and so on - came to Europe via the Silk Road.

Smartphones can relay patients' data to hospital computers in a continuous stream. Doctors can alter treatment regimens remotely, instead of making patients come in for a visit.

The embrace of a new technology by ordinary people leads inevitably to its embrace by people of malign intent.

A world with a sudden limit on air travel would be tremendously different from the one we live in now.

The human propensity is to believe that flukes of good fortune will never come to an end.

The Japanese are great at inventing complex systems of rules, and not so great at explaining those rules to foreign visitors.

The Japanese drive on the left side of the road. Most streets literally do not have names.

Compared with U.S. cities, Japanese cities bend over backward to help foreigners. The countryside is another matter.

You're the cleverest witch I've ever met Hermione.

The universe looks more and more like a great thought rather than a great machine.

God will always make a way where there is no way.

Comedy is much more challenging, because you have to have the same level of belief but you have to make people laugh, and that's definitely a challenge.

What turns ordinary people into overachievers is the way they use their minds when they are called on to perform.

I'd be happy to die for a taste of what Angel had. Someone to live for. Unafraid to say I love you.

Maybe I have just a younger voice than many other directors.

Science, math and engineering can give you the exhilarating power to become not mere spectators or consumers, but the active explorers, makers and doers who will help invent the future.

I was abducted by aliens as a boy. Aliens is the name of a pedophile who lived in my alley.

Leave for tomorrow what you can't do today.