When people talk, they lay lines on each other, do a lot of role playing, sidestep, shilly-shally and engage in all manner of vagueness and innuendo. We do this and expect others to do it, yet at the same time we profess to long for the plain truth, for people to say what they mean, simple as that. Such hypocrisy is a human universal.

The elevation of parochial values to the realm of the sacred is a license to dismiss other people's interests, and an imperative to reject the possibility of compromise

I get drawn in when I feel there is something deep and mysterious going on beneath the surface of something.

All our behaviours are a result of neurophysiological activity in the brain. There is no reason to believe there is any magic going on.

Fiction is empathy technology.

Statisticians tell us that people underestimate the sheer number of coincidences that are bound to happen in a world governed by chance.

By all measures men are the more violent gender.