The mind revels in conjecture. Where information is lacking, it will gladly fill in the gaps.

I believe aphorisms are best when first read in the wild, free from the confines of any categories.

Metaphors hide in plain sight, and their influence is largely unconscious. We should mind our metaphors, though, because metaphors make up our minds.

Metaphor impinges on everything, allowing us - poets and non-poets alike - to experience and think about the world in fluid, unusual ways.

A simile is just a metaphor with the scaffolding still up.

London always reminds me of a brain. It is similarly convoluted and circuitous. A lot of cities, especially American ones like New York and Chicago, are laid out in straight lines. Like the circuits on computer chips, there are a lot of right angles in cities like this. But London is a glorious mess. It evolved from a score or so of distinct villages, that merged and meshed as their boundaries enlarged. As a result, London is a labyrinth, full of turnings and twistings just like a brain.

By bringing together what we know and what we don't know through analogy, metaphorical thinking strikes the spark that ignites discovery.