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.

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.

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.

I'm not a natural story-teller. Put a keyboard in front of me and I'm fine, but stand me up in front of an audience and I'm actually quite shy and reserved.

I see litter as part of a long continuum of anti-social behaviour.

America is a very seductive place in terms of lifestyle and comfort, but it wasn't for me.

I often feel I'm a disappointment to people because they expect me to be the guy in the books. When I sit next to someone at a dinner party I can see they expect me to be quick and witty, and I'm not at all.

There'd never been a more advantageous time to be a criminal in America than during the 13 years of Prohibition. At a stroke, the American government closed down the fifth largest industry in the United States - alcohol production - and just handed it to criminals - a pretty remarkable thing to do.

I hadn't realized quite how extraordinary Charles Lindbergh's achievement was in flying the Atlantic alone. He had never flown over open water before, but he flew straight to Dingle Bay in Ireland and then on to Paris, exactly as planned.

I'm definitely an American, because I grew up here. But I've lived very happily in Britain.

Much as I resented having to grow up in Des Moines, it gave me a real appreciation for every place in the world that's not Des Moines.

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.

There is the odd exception, like Albert Einstein, but as a breed, scientists tend not be very good at presenting themselves.

You don't need a science degree to understand about science. You just need to think about it.

Scientists tend to be unappreciated in the world at large, but you can hardly overstate the importance of the work they do.

I've never quite understood that feeling: that you arrive in a strange place, yet you want to have nothing but familiar experiences.

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.

You may find that your parents are the most delightful people, but you don't want to live with them.

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'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.

It is unthinkable to have a British countryside that doesn't have actual functioning farmers riding tractors, cows in fields, things like that.

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.'

England was full of words I'd never heard before - streaky bacon, short back and sides, Belisha beacon, serviettes, high tea, ice-cream cornet.

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.