If you ask people why they move to the city, they always give the same reasons. They've come to get a job or follow their friends or to be at the center of a scene. That's why we pay the high rent. Cities are all about the people, not the infrastructure.

Everything around us is scale dependent. It's woven into the fabric of the universe.

My provocative statement is that we desperately need a serious, scientific theory of cities and scientific theory means quantifiable, relying on underlying generic principles that can be made in a - put into a predictive framework. That's the quest.

You could not have evolved a complex system like a city or an organism - with an enormous number of components - without the emergence of laws that constrain their behavior in order for them to be resilient.

Initially I took the job because I thought it would be really easy. I was like, I'll take the paycheck because I want to do my own movie. That didn't work out. In the first two weeks I fell in love with Kratos from an animation perspective; I'd never been able to do anything like this.

We are more dependent on science and engineering than at any other time in history. However, there is plenty of evidence that far too many people are scientifically illiterate, often having been put off science at school.

I have the best job in politics in Alabama. As the attorney general, I just go to work every day and think of a way to sue the Obama Administration. If you don't think that is fun, that is a full-time job.

I remember early in my career people telling me I needed to change my accent, that I needed to sound more professional, more BBC perhaps, but I think if I wasn't from Middlesbrough I wouldn't have done as well as I have.