The feeling one has no time to get anything done provides the pressure that guarantees one does get some things done.

I feel that the great challenge of our time is the communication of ideas.

Anyone who isn't embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn't learning enough.

What makes the prospect of death distinctive in the modern age is the background of permanent technological and sociological revolution against which it is set, and which serves to strip us of any possible faith in the permanence of our labours. Our ancestors could believe that their achievements had a chance of bearing up against the flow of events. We know time to be a hurricane. Our buildings, our sense of style, our ideas, all of these will soon enough be anachronisms, and the machines in which we now take inordinate pride will seem no less bathetic than Yorick's skull.

I remember going to university, and the people who'd left home for the first time looked at the food and were horrified. Whereas, my view was that if it was vaguely edible, then it's fine.

I'm one of those introverted people who simply feels a lot better after spending time alone thinking through ideas and emotions. This is a sign, I've come to think, of a kind of emotional disturbance - a reaction to inner fragility. I wish I were more able to just act and do, rather than constantly have to retreat and examine and think.