They (environmentalists) made comments like they want to get the combustion engine completely out of the forest. We can't make ourselves extinct.

From the first smouldering taper to the elegant lanterns whose light reverberated around eighteenth-century courtyards and from the mild radiance of those lanterns to the unearthly glow of the sodium lamps that line the Belgian motorways, it has all been combustion. Combustion is the hidden principle behind every artefact we create. The making of a fish-hook, manufacture of a china cup, or production of a television programme, all depend on the same process of combustion. Like our bodies and like our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers.

Environmentalists have a very conflicted relationship with their cars.

The forest up through here has been completely destroyed. I say completely, but probably by 80 percent, and the root of the problem is that we have to go and reforest the hill and until we do that, every two, three, four years after some heavy rain the same thing could happen again,

wholly deserved and I'm completely thrilled.

The desert, when the sun comes up...I couldn't tell where heaven stopped and the Earth began.