Think about what artists, novelists and poets have in common: the ability to engage in metaphorical thinking, linking seemingly unrelated ideas, such as, 'It is the east, and Juliet is the Sun.'

Indeed, the line between perceiving and hallucinating is not as crisp as we like to think. In a sense, when we look at the world, we are hallucinating all the time. One could almost regard perception as the act of choosing the one hallucination that best fits the incoming data.

Your conscious life is an elaborate after-the-fact rationalization of things you really do for other reasons.

In fact, on one occasion, a rather pedantic experimental psychologist was telling him about a long, complicated experiment he had done, incorporating all the proper controls and using considerable technical virtuosity. When he saw Crick's exasperated expression he said, "but Dr. Crick, we have got it right - we know it's right," Crick's response was, "The point is not whether it's right. The point is: does it even matter whether its right or wrong?"

The minute you succumb to outside pressure, you cease to be creative.

Great art allows you to transcend your mortal frame and to reach for the stars. I think great science does the same thing.

Even today no computer can understand language as well as a three-year-old or see as well as a mouse.