Once you begin deliberating about where your fingers are jumping on the piano keyboard, you can no longer pull off the piece.

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.

Behind each and every difficult mountain is an easy valley. Keep climbing

I am so used to having a comfortable life. What will it be like when I am no longer able to just buy anything I want?

For years I've been stressing with regard to UFOs that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

I bathe in basslines, rinse in riffs, dry in drums

I have a face that is a cross between two pounds of halibut and an explosion in an old clothes closet.

To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices.

My only interest in photographing is photography.

But leave me to my beer! Gold is dross, love is loss, so if I gulp my sorrows down, or see them drown in foamy draughts of old nut-brown, then I do wear the crown, without the cross!

Ponce de Leon, who said when he discovered the Fountain of Youth, Where the hell are the paper cups? Never got a dinner!

I've learned one important thing about God's gifts - what we do with them is our gift to Him.