A...reason we are so-so scientists is that our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes truth is adaptive, but sometimes it is not.

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

Writers acquire their technique by spotting, savoring, and reverse-engineering examples of good prose.

In many Muslim countries, witchcraft is not only on the books as a crime, but is commonly prosecuted. In 2009, for example, Saudi Arabia convicted a man for carrying a phone booklet with characters in an alphabet from his native Eritrea, which the police interpreted as occult symbols. He was lashed three hundred times and imprisoned for more than three years.

Fiction is empathy technology.

Conventions are unstated agreements within a community to abide by a single way of doing things - not because there is any inherent advantage to the choice, but because there is an advantage to everyone making the same choice.

We can make fun of hockey fans, but someone who enjoys Homer is indulging the same kind of vicarious bloodlust.