In general, we’re least aware of what our minds do best.

We rarely recognize how wonderful it is that a person can traverse an entire lifetime without making a single really serious mistake — like putting a fork in one's eye or using a window instead of a door.

I cannot articulate enough to express my dislike to people who think that understanding spoils your experience... How would they know?

In general, we’re least aware of what our minds do best.

This is a tricky domain because, unlike simple arithmetic, to solve a calculus problem - and in particular to perform integration - you have to be smart about which integration technique should be used: integration by partial fractions, integration by parts, and so on.

A couple of hundred years from now, maybe [science fiction writers] Isaac Asimov and Fred Pohl will be considered the important philosophers of the twentieth century, and the professional philosophers will almost all be forgotten, because they're just shallow and wrong, and their ideas aren't very powerful.

General fiction is pretty much about ways that people get into problems and screw their lives up. Science fiction is about everything else.