Most of who we are is our deepest emotions, and someone who cannot feel those emotions in a positive way is never going to understand much about his fellow human beings.

A conscience is, for a while anyway, pretty easy to fake.

The physical basis for sociopathy is approximately 50 percent inheritable, which sounds more dramatic than it probably is, because most personality characteristics that psychologists test for and study the genetics of are about 50 percent inheritable. Introversion, extroversion, it turns out that they're about 50 percent inheritable, which means that somehow sociopathy is physical, it's organic.

If you don't have a conscience, what is your behavior like? Apparently, if you don't have a conscience, if you don't really . . . love, then the only thing that's left for you is the game - it's about controlling things.

To learn to be charming is fairly easy - you can teach somebody to be charming and to learn human emotions - or to learn the behaviors that go with human emotions. A sociopath, a smart one, will study the way we emote, and will learn how to do that quite effectively.

One way or another, a life without conscience is a failed life.

When I speak of divisions greater than gender or race, I say that because it is so unimaginable. I can imagine what it would be like to be another race. Or to be a man - I could draw that up in my mind and experience it. Schizophrenia? We're all schizophrenic in our dreams. Depression? Most of us have been at least a little depressed and can imagine it. But not having a conscience? Conscience is so profound and so basic in most of us.