The first thing we learn from studying our own circuitry is a simple lesson: most of what we do and think and feel is not under our conscious control.

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.

. . . I lay on the bed and lost myself in the stories. I liked that. Books were safer than other people anyway.

Amanda took the torn page from Maniac. To her, it was the broken wing of a bird, a pet out in the rain.

there are no inferior types of fiction, only inferior practitionersof them

History is written by the rich, and so the poor get blamed for everything.

Survival, " I said softly. "It's selfish, and it's dark, and we've always been a species willing to do anything to satisfy our needs. Individuals have morals. Mobs have appetites.

Working a Patent is not as easy as it sounds

Ain't no right way to do the wrong thing.

I think to love bravely is the best and accept - as much as one can bear.

The qualities in music which I considered most important - and still do - were beauty, simplicity, originality, discrimination, and sincerity.