I like ice hockey. No one is ever going to ask me to write about that as a metaphor for life.

Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language.

Why are empirical questions about how the mind works so weighted down with political and moral and emotional baggage?

All our behaviours are a result of neurophysiological activity in the brain. There is no reason to believe there is any magic going on.

I suspect music is auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of... our mental faculties.

Evolutionary psychology is one of four sciences that are bringing human nature back into the picture.

Thanks to the redundancy of language, yxx cxn xndxrstxnd whxt x xm wrxtxng xvxn xf x rxplxcx xll thx vxwxls wxth xn "x" (t gts lttl hrdr f y dn't vn kn whr th vwls r)

Photography is a kind of virtual reality, and it helps if you can create the illusion of being in an interesting world.

Plants can't very well defend themselves by their behavior, so they resort to chemical warfare, and plants are saturated with toxins and irritants to deter creatures like us who want to eat them.

I would argue that nothing gives life more purpose than the realization that every moment of consciousness is a precious and fragile gift.

Babies are born with the instinct to speak, the way spiders are born with the instinct to spin webs. You don't need to train babies to speak; they just do. But reading is different.

You don't know what it is to stay a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word.

Challenges turned the eye inward to empower a renewed self for an enhanced future.

For her, marriage was a sweetened version of murder.

We were still young enough to remember the cubist architecture of the piles of corpses we had seen during the war.

Man wishes woman to be peaceable, but in fact she is essentially warlike, like the cat.

I want to keep fighting because it's the only thing that keeps me out of the hamburger joints. If I don't fight, I'll eat this planet.

I write my lyrics the day I sing the song, so even when I have the basic things, I'm thinking what can I change, what can I add, how many harmonies can I do.

You don't make stupid jokes in art.

If my uniform doesn't get dirty, I haven't done anything in the baseball game.

Maybe one day a song might make you feel completely different than the next, but I like to have a lot of everything in my songs.