The skyline in Alfred Hitchcock's 'Rope' is made up: no, you don't get the Waldorf and the Chrysler and the Empire State buildings and a dozen other magnificent structures in one window.

The Rio de Contas, a wide, almost delta-like river, was startling, a sudden big sky and a feeling of openness, and very bright. It was noisy with birds. The rain forest houses most of the earth's plant and animal population. I hadn't anticipated it would be so loud.

People have all this interest in food. But for most people, it's a mystery how to prepare food. I wanted the knowledge cooks know: the in-your-fingers knowledge you get by doing it over and over.

I ended up wanting to be a cook and hold my own in a restaurant.

I think computer science, by and large, is still stuck in the Modern age.

We are not a trading company. We are a midstream asset company: pipe, storage and terminals. It's an unsexy, dirty business. It's not rocket science.

Philosophy used to be a field that had content, but then 'natural philosophy' became physics, and physics has only continued to make inroads. Every time there's a leap in physics, it encroaches on these areas that philosophers have carefully sequestered away to themselves, and so then you have this natural resentment on the part of philosophers.

The word 'universe' is obviously not intended to have a plural, but science has evolved in such a way that we need a plural noun for something similar to what we ordinarily call our universe.