This was, I would later realise, a planet of things wrapped inside things. Food inside wrappers. Bodies inside clothes. Contempt inside smiles. Everything was hidden away.

If you think something is ugly, look harder. Ugliness is just a failure of seeing.

There is only one genre in fiction, the genre is called book.

The possibility of pain is where love stems from

The single biggest act of bravery or madness anyone can do is the act of change.

Make sure, as often as possible, you are doing something you’d be happy to die doing.

End-users not technologies shape the market. Consequently marketers need to stay abreast not only of technological developments but also of the way people respond to them.

Love is scary because it pulls you in with an intense force, a supermassive black hole which looks like nothing from the outside but from the inside challenges every reasonable thing you know. You lose yourself, like I lost myself, in the warmest of annihilations.

Dark matter is needed to hold galaxies together. Your mind is a Galaxy. More dark than light. But the light makes it worthwhile.

Knowledge is finite. Wonder is infinite.

Everyone represses everything. Do you think any of these normal human beings really do exactly what they want to do all the time? 'Course not. It's just the same. We're middle-class and we're British. Repression is in our veins.

Flowers, after love, must have been the best advert planet Earth had going for it.

Advice for a human. 81. You can't find happiness looking for the meaning of life. Meaning is only the third most important thing. It comes after loving and being. 82. If you think something is ugly, look harder. Ugliness is just a failure of seeing.

And how could I believe that Australian wine was automatically inferior to wine sourced from other regions on the planet when I had never drunk anything but liquid nitrogen?