Our internal life and external actions are steered by biological coctails to which we have neither immediate access nor direct acquaintance.

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.

A wedding is no way to begin a marriage.

How did writing come to me? Like bird’s down on my windowpane, in winter. Just then there rose in the heart a struggle of firebrands, which has, still now, not ended.

I would love to work in America. I wouldn't love to live there, but I'd love to experience working there.

We're going to take on the big media, big business, and big donors that are bleeding our country dry. We're losing our jobs.

Enlightenment is the complete awareness of life without mental modifications.

Perhaps I'm just optimistic.

Look to the Heavens, you can look to the skies. You can find redemption staring back into your eyes.

Distressed properties are often vacant and in disrepair, and thus sold at significant discounts. As the share of distressed sales grows, home prices fall.

This is in the end the only kind of courage that is required of us: the courage to face the strangest, most unusual, most inexplicable experiences that can meet us.

Critical opinion on my films has always been salvaged by what I would call subsequent critical opinion.