The arts are weapons of understanding and weapons of happiness.

If the arts are held up solely as a means of social insight, fantasy is denied the chance to be commonplace and reality the chance to be exotic.

What we hold in our heads - our memory, our feelings, our thoughts, our sense of our own history - is the sum of our humanity.

I've always argued, unsuccessfully, that there's no point in giving money to the arts unless you educate people in them.

Science is about nothing but getting at the truth, and anything that gets in the way of that diminishes, in my experience, the science.

I'm doing a book, 'Chasing Science,' about the pleasures of science as a spectator sport.

I always wanted to at least visit Dubai - it was a city that I loved to watch on the Discovery Channel. It had the world's biggest everything and clearly had a vision to stand out.

We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success. We often discover what will do, by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery.