One of the most distinctive evolutionary features of human beings is our unusually long, protected childhood.

I'm afraid the parenting advice to come out of developmental psychology is very boring: pay attention to your kids and love them.

Because we imagine, we can have invention and technology. It's actually play, not necessity, that is the mother of invention.

What's it like to be a baby? It's like being in love in Paris for the first time after you've had three double espressos.

Adults often assume that most learning is the result of teaching and that exploratory, spontaneous learning is unusual. But actually, spontaneous learning is more fundamental.

The more obsessively we focus on what a particular food is going to do for us, the less healthy we've become. Simple pleasures become complicated.

The brain is highly structured, but it is also extremely flexible. It's not a blank slate, but it isn't written in stone, either.

Animals are certainly more sophisticated than we used to think. And we shouldn't lump together animals as a group. Crows and chimps and dogs are all highly intelligent in very different ways.

The largest and most powerful computers are still no match for the smallest and weakest humans.

Babies and young children are like the research and development division of the human species, and we grown-ups are production and marketing.

What teenagers want most of all are social rewards, especially the respect of their peers.

How had this happened? Everyone in the world knew more than us, about everything, and this I hated then found hugely comforting.

Not being interested in other cultures is the normal state of mankind.

They had money - quite a bit of it, actually - but for them, money was just bullets.

I'm a firm believer in doing things that scare you.

The comic world has its own limitations, as everything does. I adore it, I respect it, but it's not going to take over all of me.

Only a country that feels invulnerable can afford political turmoil as entertainment.

But maybe boredom is erotic, when women do it, for men.

Grief, like a tree, has tears for its fruit.

You can't have style if you don't have substance.

God has more for you in your future than you could ever dream of in your present and he's already seen you in it.