Jonah Lehrer is one of the most talented explainers of science that we’ve got. What a pleasure it is to follow his investigation of creativity and its sources. Imagine is his best book yet.

If you want to live a memorable life, you have to be the kind of person who remembers to remember.

Our lives are the sum of our memories. How much are we willing to lose from our already short lives by … not paying attention?

Memory is like a spiderweb that catches new information. The more it catches, the bigger it grows. And the bigger it grows, the more it catches.

What makes things memorable is that they are meaningful, significant, colorful.

The more we remember, the better we are at processing the world. And the better we are at processing the world, the more we can remember about it.

To the extent that experience is the sum of our memories and wisdom the sum of experience, having a better memory would mean knowing not only more about the world, but also more about myself.

...who we are and what we do it is fundamentally a function of what we remember.

As bad as we are at remembering names and phone numbers and word-for-word instructions from our colleagues, we have really exceptional visual and spatial memories.

Invented languages have often been created in tandem with entire invented universes, and most conlangers come to their craft by way of fantasy and science fiction.

Memory training is not just for the sake of performing party tricks; it's about nurturing something profoundly and essentially human.

When liberals finally grasped the strength of popular feeling about the family, they cried to appropriate the rhetoric and symbolism of family values for their own purposes.

There is nothing more marvelous or madder than real life.

It's the wise man who stays home when he's drunk.

You have to be willing to put everything you've got towards the project. That to me is very important. And it may not be part of the fad, being the clichéd kind of film that's going to be successful.

I like music to soothe me.

Believing in books is a lot like believing in God.

The method of satyagraha requires that the satyagrahi should never lose hope, so long as there is the slightest ground left for it.

But when we observe, we are forced to pay attention. We have to move from passive absorption to active awareness. We have to engage.

Even in the midst of love-making, writers are working on the description.

The terrible tyranny of the majority.