Most writers or performers walk around with the notion in their head that - a paranoid worry that maybe people don't like them.

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.

Philosophers, Poets and Fools have similar Consciousness

Friends are forever but life is full of disapointments

Anybody who thinks small towns are friendlier than big cities lives in a big city.

I find that screen kissing wears very thin very quickly.

Do what I want, be honest to myself and then it would do good for others, that's all, full on.

Between every two pines is a doorway to a new world.

I wish [my wife] would [work] because - especially now the kind of - I mean, honesty is hardly the word. She writes with a ferocity of clarity that - nobody else around has now.

Bakery air is that steaming hot front of thick, buttery fumes waiting for you just inside the door of a bakery. And I am just going to tell you straight up: That is some fine air!

A clerk and a ladder and warm golden light, and then: the right book exactly, at exactly the right time.

The descent beckons as the ascent beckoned