Boston's freeway system is insane. It was clearly designed by a person who had spent his childhood crashing toy trains.

There are only three things that can kill a farmer: lightning, rolling over in a tractor, and old age.

I have long known that it is part of God's plan for me to spend a little time with each of the most stupid people on earth.

The whole of the global economy is based on supplying the cravings of two per cent of the world's population.

The remarkable position in which we find ourselves is that we don't actually know what we actually know.

More than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to.

I come from Des Moines. Someone had to.

In order to have quality journalism you need to have a good income stream, and no Internet model has produced a way of generating income that would pay for good-quality investigative journalism.

We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.

I am who I am.

He'd noticed that sex bore some resemblance to cookery: it fascinated people, they sometimes bought books full of complicated recipes and interesting pictures, and sometimes when they were really hungry they created vast banquets in their imagination - but at the end of the day they'd settle quite happily for egg and chips. If it was well done and maybe had a slice of tomato.

And Sam Vimes thought: Why is Young Sam's nursery full of farmyard animals anyway? Why are his books full of moo-cows and baa-lambs? He is growing up in the city. He will only see them on a plate! They go sizzle!

I had a deprived childhood, you see. I had lots of other kids to play with and my parents bought me outdoor toys and refused to ill-treat me, so it never occurred to me to seek solitary consolation with a good book.

Granddad was superstitious about books. He thought that if you had enough of them around, education leaked out, like radioactivity.

The Library didn't only contain magical books, the ones which are chained to their shelves and are very dangerous. It also contained perfectly ordinary books, printed on commonplace paper in mundane ink. It would be a mistake to think that they weren't also dangerous, just because reading them didn't make fireworks go off in the sky. Reading them sometimes did the more dangeous trick of making fireworks go off in the privacy of the reader's brain.

If the government ever imposes a tax on books - and I wouldn't put it past them - I'm in dead trouble.

You can't die with an unfinished book.

The three rules of the Librarians of Time and Space are: 1) Silence; 2) Books must be returned by no later than the date shown; and 3) Do not interfere with the nature of causality.

This book was written using 100% recycled words.

Sometimes words need music too. Sometimes the descriptions are not enough. Books should be written with soundtracks, like films.

It looked like the sort of book described in library catalogues as "slightly foxed", although it would be more honest to admit that it looked as though it had beed badgered, wolved and possibly beared as well. -- Ah, but has it been hedgehogged?

In theory it was, around now, Literature. Susan hated Literature. She'd much prefer to read a good book.

He had never been interested in stories at any age, and had never quite understood the basic concept. He'd never read a work of fiction all the way through. He did remember, as a small boy, being really annoyed at the depiction of Hickory Dickory Dock in a rag book of nursery rhymes because the clock in the drawing was completely wrong for the period.

Winston Churchill said 'In war time, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies'. Any book called The Truth should therefore have one.