Happiness doesn't require laughter, only well-being and a sense that the world is breaking someone else's heart, not mine.

The brain is only three pounds of blood, dream, and electricity, and yet from that mortal stew come Beethoven's sonatas. Dizzie Gillespie's jazz. Audrey Hepburn's wish to spend the last month of her life in Somalia, saving children.

So before I start work on a book, I'm like a pregnant mole - I obsessively tidy and order my closets and everything in my study. Because there's such a cascade of images and ideas that I'm grapping with mentally, I couldn't also be in a chaotic setting.

Culture is what people invent when they have lost nature.

... love is an act of sedition, a revolt against reason, an uprising in the body politic, a private mutiny.

I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.

All relationships change the brain - but most important are the intimate bonds that foster or fail us, altering the delicate circuits that shape memories, emotions and that ultimate souvenir, the self.