Plants can't very well defend themselves by their behavior, so they resort to chemical warfare, and plants are saturated with toxins and irritants to deter creatures like us who want to eat them.

Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language.

Why are empirical questions about how the mind works so weighted down with political and moral and emotional baggage?

All our behaviours are a result of neurophysiological activity in the brain. There is no reason to believe there is any magic going on.

I suspect music is auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of... our mental faculties.

Evolutionary psychology is one of four sciences that are bringing human nature back into the picture.

Thanks to the redundancy of language, yxx cxn xndxrstxnd whxt x xm wrxtxng xvxn xf x rxplxcx xll thx vxwxls wxth xn "x" (t gts lttl hrdr f y dn't vn kn whr th vwls r)

Photography is a kind of virtual reality, and it helps if you can create the illusion of being in an interesting world.

I would argue that nothing gives life more purpose than the realization that every moment of consciousness is a precious and fragile gift.

Babies are born with the instinct to speak, the way spiders are born with the instinct to spin webs. You don't need to train babies to speak; they just do. But reading is different.

We will never have a perfect world, but it's not romantic or naive to work toward a better one.

The value of surrounding yourself with positive people is not what you get from them, but how good a person you have become because of them.

To me there has never been a higher source of earthly honor or distinction than that connected with advances in science.

The trouble with wedlock is that there's not enough wed and too much lock.

Would a real man get caught eating a twinkie?

People love drama, and if you aren't really interested in perpetuating that, it keeps you from exploding on a mainstream stage. I'm totally fine with that.

So ahead of my time even when i rhyme about the future I be reminiscing

We're all in a test. With or without God, we're in a test.

I learned English by watching soaps as a kid, and since I don't have any formal education and can't teach at the universities like other literary writers do.

It is amazing how much a thought expands and refines by being put into speech: I should think it could hardly know itself.

I think it's important to keep the audience interested. But the best advice that I've gotten is to live in the moment. Sometimes you can get too into your head when you're in a scene.