What Ann Druyan said: Compressed into a minute-long segment, the brain waves of a woman newly in love sound like a string of firecrackers exploding.

A few nights later, I secretly hope that I might be a genius. Why else can no amount of sleeping pills fell my brain? But in the morning my daughter asks me what a cloud is and I cannot say.

A thought experiment courtesy of the Stoics. If you are tired of everything you possess, imagine that you have lost all these things.

The wife watched her neighbor get fat over the next year. The Germans have a word for that. Kummerspeck. Literally, grief bacon.

Is she a good baby? People would ask me. Well, no, I'd say.That swirl of hair on the back of her head. We must have taken a thousand pictures of it.

Here is what happens in middle age: Some friends and acquaintances who were merely eccentric for years become unmistakably mad.

Once when he was still young, I saw a bit of his scalp showing through his hair and I was afraid. But it was just a cowlick. Now sometimes it shows through for real, but I feel only tenderness.

Whenever the wife wants to do drugs, she thinks about Sartre. One bad trip and then a giant lobster followed him around for the rest of his days.

I think politics come out of psychology.

Conscience is the root of all true courage.

Nothing can be more readily disproved than the old saw, "You can't keep a good man down." Most human societies have been beautifully organized to keep good men down.

I always try to preserve my cinematographic style, even while I work in the US. I wish to always be European.

A sealed book, at whose contents we tremble.

I can see lights in the distance trembling in the dark cloak of night Candles and lanterns are dancing, dancing a waltz on All Souls Night.

I can still love my heroine like i did when i was 26. I can still do the same action scenes.

Given enough coffee I could rule the world

My natural-born sarcasm, when it's unimpeded, can be a bit overbearing at times and I'm the first to admit that.

In the old days, athletes got worked up about the strict rules - today they get worked up about these rules being ignored elsewhere.