“It gets off to a pretty slow start, the main character does a total 180 about half way through, and the rest of the book is about his kid. It ends on a bit of a downer.”

“Australians are very unfair in this way. They spend half of any conversation insisting that the country's dangers are vastly overrated and that there's nothing to worry about, and the other half telling you how six months ago their Uncle Bob was driving to Mudgee when a tiger snake slid out from under the dashboard and bit him on the groin, but that it's okay now because he's off the life support machine and they've discovered he can communicate with eye blinks.”

“Women cannot complain about men anymore until they start getting better taste in them.”

“You know, sometimes kids get bad grades in school because the class moves too slow for them. Einstein got D's in school. Well guess what, I get F's!!!”

“The one thought Conan had on the spot about the half hour at 11:35 was that it would likely exacerbate the problem he already had with Leno. 'So at least now, Jay does his show, but there's the break of the news, and that's kind of the reset button,' Conan said to Gaspin and Graboff. 'At 11:35 Jay's going to come out and do twenty jokes. And then what's he going to do?'When they replied that it seemed likely he would have only one guest, Conan said, 'OK. And then I come out and do what?'The NBC guys didn't really have an answer for that other than what Conan had already been doing: his own monologue. That this now seemed like a late-night pileup - three shows with monologues lined up end to end - was the implication no one had really addressed.Finally Conan did have something he really wanted to say, something that had almost burned a hole in his chest. 'What does Jay have on you?' Conan asked, his voice still low, his tone still even. 'What does this guy have on you people? What the hell is it about Jay?”

“There’s something satisfying, I think,’ Evans said, ‘about the idea of light travelling for millions of years through space and just at the right moment as it reaches Earth someone looks at the right bit of sky and sees it. It just seems right that an event of that magnitude should be witnessed.”

“Beware 'good' main characters who have a limited repertory of culturally acceptable feelings, while your evil bastards have a full range of vivid, passionate feelings.”