Des Moines is like your typical American city; it’s just these concentric circles of malls, built outward from the city.
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.
America is a very seductive place in terms of lifestyle and comfort, but it wasn’t for me.
America is a great disappointment to me. As I said in one of my books, other societies create civilisations; we build shopping malls.
A world without newspapers or a world where the newspapers are purely electronic and you read them on a screen is not a very appealing world.
I can’t fix the world. If you want to make a difference in life, you have to direct your energies in a focused way.
I don’t want to go and start trying to make jokes in places like India, Tanzania or Iraq. Afghanistan is not a funny place.
I see litter as part of a long continuum of anti-social behaviour.
I understand cricket – what’s going on, the scoring – but I can’t understand why.
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.
Britain still has the most reliably beautiful countryside of anywhere in the world. I would hate to be part of the generation that allowed that to be lost.
All the things that are part of your heritage make you British – that makes this country what it is. It’s part of your history. And here, unlike America, it’s still living history.
You may find that your parents are the most delightful people, but you don’t want to live with them.
There is the odd exception, like Albert Einstein, but as a breed, scientists tend not be very good at presenting themselves.
The first book I did – the first successful book – was a kind of a travel book, and publishers in Britain encouraged me to do more.
It is unthinkable to have a British countryside that doesn’t have actual functioning farmers riding tractors, cows in fields, things like that.
In a funny way, nothing makes you feel more like a native of your own country than to live where nearly everyone is not.
Boston’s freeway system is insane. It was clearly designed by a person who had spent his childhood crashing toy trains.
Life just wants to be; but it doesn’t want to be much.
Christmas tree stands are the work of the devil and they want you dead.