I bought a lot of rubbish things that kids buy: skateboards and clothes and typical teenage stuff. And as soon as I could I wasted a lot of money on cars - BMW's mostly - for myself and my family.

All the faith and good will in the world is wasted without direction.

I've never been cool and I don't really care about being cool. It's just an awful lot of time and hair gel wasted.

Our economic system run for profit and waste and based primarily on the extractive industries is the cause of climate change. We have wasted the earth's treasure and we can no longer exploit it cheaply.

Billions are wasted on ineffective philanthropy. Philanthropy is decades behind business in applying rigorous thinking to the use of money.

Speaking of Twitter I don't even know if I composed a blog entry in 2009 as I was too busy parceling my every thought into cute 140-character sound bites. I used to only worry about being pithy for a living now some of my best lines are wasted on a free app!

Because if one is writing novels today concentrating on the beauty of the prose is right up there with concentrating on your semi-colons for wasted effort.