I'm using the afterlife as a backdrop against which to explore the joys and complexities of being human - it turns out that it's a great lens with which to understand what matters to us.

What we find is that our brains have colossal things happening in them all the time.

Every atom in your body is the same quark in different places at the same moment in time.

Instead of reality being passively recorded by the brain, it is actively constructed by it.

As an undergraduate I majored in British and American literature at Rice University.

The first lesson about trusting your senses is: don't. Just because you believe something to be true, just because you know it's true, that doesn't mean it is true.

It turns out your conscious mind - the part you think of as you - is really the smallest part of what’s happening in your brain, and usually the last one in line to find out any information.

There is a looming chasm between what your brain knows and what your mind is capable of accessing.

You are more likely to believe that a statement is true if you have heard it before - whether or not it is actually true.

Love was not specified in the design of your brain; it is merely an endearing algorithm that freeloads on the leftover processing cycles.

We don't really understand most of what's happening in the cosmos. Is there any afterlife? Who knows.

The instinct to tell our children that they are better than someone else’s children, based on nothing more than the color of their skin, is now a fossilized aberration that serves no useful purpose.

Grace is God-divine favour.

If you don't take care of this the most magnificent machine that you will ever be given...where are you going to live?

Curiosity is only vanity. We usually only want to know something so that we can talk about it.

The successful man doesn't use others, other people use the successful man, for above all the success is of service.

As long as I could pitch a little, no one cared that I was getting drunk.

Feel that you are happy without any cause for happiness.

I'm going to Inter to see if they will let me play a bit of football.

I don't think I'm capable of making radical changes, but over a period of four or five years you can perceive very big changes, and they seem rather small at the time.

All photographs aspire to the condition of being memorable - that is, unforgettable.