“You don’t have to be unscientific to make beautiful art or to write beautiful things…”

The existence of a higher power with any consciousness or interest in the human race or ability to punish or reward humans for their moral choices or that there is any reason other than fear to believe in any version of an afterlife, I will give you my piano, one of my legs and my wife.

If I had a religion, its deity would be Audysseus, the sound God, and He would be a vengeful god, dishing out eternal damnation to people with cheap stage monitors.

Empathy is intuitive, but it is also something you can work on intellectually.

Isn’t this enough? Just this world? Just this beautiful, complex wonderfully unfathomable world?

Throughout history, every mystery ever solved has turned out to be NOT magic.

There are children in Africa, starving to death, and you don’t hear them whinging.

Science adjusts its views based on what’s observed.

To dream of the person you would like to be is to waste the person you are.

Define yourself by what you love.

It’s an incredibly exciting thing, this one, meaningless life of yours.

We must think critically, and not just about the ideas of others. Be hard on your beliefs.

Faith is the denial of observation so that belief can be preserved.

Please don’t make the mistake of thinking that the arts and sciences are at odds with one another. That is a recent, stupid and damaging idea.

You know what they call alternative medicine that’s been proved to work? – Medicine.

Only a ginger, can call another ginger Ginger.

How does it so fail to hold our attention that we have to diminish it with the invention of cheap, man-made myths and monsters?

Welders make more money than philosophers. We need more welders and less philosophers.

You can make all the excuses you want, but if you’re not mentally tough and you’re not prepared to play every night, you’re not going to win.

I’m just gonna make art myself. I have a lot of ideas of things I wanna do and really talented people and friends I’m around, so we decided to make our own thing and set out to do it.

The xenophobic individual can only reject and destroy, as the xenophobic nation inevitably makes war.

The problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat

Every time I am looking into the depths of somebody’s brain, I’m thinking, ‘This is what makes a person who they are. That structure contains memories. Everything that they’ve ever experienced is right in there.’

I think we need to simplify our tax code, but not as a way of generating revenue, as a way of making our tax code more growth- friendly.

70% of children born into poverty will never make it to the middle class. The uncomfortable truth is that there are now a number of other countries with as much or more opportunity than ours. In fact, more people in Canada go on to surpass the income of their parents than in the United States.