After years of having immersed myself in science, I do think that if you master several different ways of thinking, it makes your own thought processes more agile.

Widowers marry again because it makes their lives easier. Widows often don't, because it makes their lives harder. [p. 61]

There is this assumption that much of what I write is about my life, and that simply is not true.

Intellectual curiosity about one's own illness is certainly born of a desire for mastery. If I couldn't cure myself, perhaps I could at least begin to understand myself.

Our brain and our whole nervous system and our whole body are only created in relation to other people and to the environment. So what we have here is an enormously complex notion of both consciousness and unconsciousness. That's why these models get very difficult, because you can't reduce our subjective and intersubjective experience to neural reductions.

The truth is that personality inevitably bleeds into all forms of our intellectual life. We all extrapolate from our own lives in order to understand the world.

I remember thinking how easy it is to speak in clichés, to steal a line from pulp fiction and let it fall. We can only hover around the inexpressible with our words anyway, and there is comfort in saying what we have heard before.