I'm a great believer that you had to do everything you've done to have got to where you are.
Anyone who has read my books will know that I don't tend to use guides when I am travelling. It's not a pride thing, but it is certainly a fact.
In 1927, if you were stuck with idle time, reading is what you did. It's no accident that the 'Book-of-the-Month Club' and 'The Literary Guild' were founded in that period as well as a lot of magazines, like 'Reader's Digest,' 'Time,' and 'The New Yorker.'
I have made a career of bumbling around places, stumbling on landmarks and generally being quite haphazard and shambolic about the way I go about things.
I've been writing all these books that have been largely autobiographical and yet, really, they don't tell you anything about me. I just use my life story as a kind of device on which to hang comic observations. It's not my interest or instinct to tell the world anything pertinent about myself or my family.
I just use my life story as a kind of device on which to hang comic observations. It's not my interest or instinct to tell the world anything pertinent about myself or my family.
In the countryside, litter doesn't have a friend. It doesn't have anybody who's saying, 'Wait a minute, this is really starting to get out of control.'
I could give you a long list of things I like about Britain, but essentially what it comes down to is that I feel about Britain the same way I feel about my wife. I'm crazy about my wife - we just kind of suit each other. I wouldn't say that she's the most fantastic human being that's ever lived, but she is for me.
I've been wanting to do a book about baseball for the longest time, and nobody will let me do it. It's the one thing from America I really miss.
To me, the greatest invention of my lifetime is the laptop computer and the fact that I can be working on a book and be in an airport lounge, in a hotel room, and continue working; I fire up my laptop, and I'm in exactly the same place I was when I left home - that, to me, is a miracle.
Maine is wonderful. It can be very hard. I mean, if you look at the profile maps it doesn't look it, but somehow when you get out there it's really steep and hard.
If you drive to, say, Shenandoah National Park, or the Great Smoky Mountains, you'll get some appreciation for the scale and beauty of the outdoors. When you walk into it, then you see it in a completely different way. You discover it in a much slower, more majestic sort of way.
Science has been quite embattled. It's the most important thing there is. An arts graduate is not going to fix global warming. They may do other valuable things, but they are not going to fix the planet or cure cancer or get rid of malaria.
America is a great disappointment to me. As I said in one of my books, other societies create civilisations; we build shopping malls.
Coming back to your native land after an absence of many years is a surprisingly unsettling business, a little like waking from a long coma. Time, you discover, has wrought changes that leave you feeling mildly foolish and out of touch.
I once joked in a book that there are three things you can't do in life. You can't beat the phone company, you can't make a waiter see you until he is ready to see you, and you can't go home again. Since the spring of 1995, I have been quietly, even gamely, reassessing point number three.
One of the brilliant things about Britain is the way you've managed to save old things but to keep using them - that they've not just become museums the way they do in the United States.
Scientists tend to be unappreciated in the world at large, but you can hardly overstate the importance of the work they do.
Personally, I've never been attracted to danger. It's not my sort of thing. I am more attracted to pubs and cafes. The known, safe and comfortable world.
The real problem you get with humour is that you only have so many kinds of jokes within you, and you mine that vein a lot. This isn't just common to me; it's anybody who's funny.
