How could poetry and literature have arisen from something as plebian as the cuneiform equivalent of grocery-store bar codes? I prefer the version in which Prometheus brought writing to man from the gods. But then I remind myself that...we should not be too fastidious about where great ideas come from. Ultimately, they all come from a wrinkled organ that at its healthiest has the color and consistency of toothpaste, and in the end only withers and dies.

A creative idea will be defined simply as one that is both novel and useful or influential in a particular social setting.

Several factors besides skill are more significant in professional writers than in most amateurs. One is love of the surface level of language: the sound of it; the taste of it on the tongue; what it can be made to do in virtuosic passages that exist only for their own sake, like cadenzas in baroque concerti. Writers in love with their tools are not unlike surgeons obsessed with their scalpels, or Arctic sled racers who sleep among their dogs even when they don't have to.

The mania is like wasps under the skin, like my head's going to explode with ideas.

What made me empathic was my depressions.

It's no fun feeling your thoughts are being controlled by an electrode, and someone else is holding the clicker.

Neurology and psychiatry should be treating the same organ.