Many of the projects that we do that appear quite successful, it's actually often the second or third time we've given it a try.

One thing that I've been doing for a long time is to wake up really early. I try to get up around 4 or 5 in the morning, long before most of my lab members are up, which gives me some quiet time to really think without distraction. I think that's important.

Maybe we'll understand more about how the universe came to be, and what forces drove it in the early days and which forces drive it now.

It's not even known how many kinds of cells there are in the brain. If you were looking for a periodic table of the brain, there is no such thing. I really like to think of the brain as a computer.

A big part of my job is to remember failure, and reboot failure, when the timing is right.

If you give somebody a lot of questions to answer and then they walk by a bowl of candy, they are more likely to grab the candy because they're tired out from answering questions and can't resist.

A lot of good ideas are actually bad ideas because, since they sound good, everybody's already doing them.