“The brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good. Understanding is joyous.”

The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

The very act of understanding is a celebration of joining, merging, even if on a very modest scale, with the magnificence of the Cosmos.

We are all stardust.

Be grateful everyday for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.

Books are like seeds. They can lie dormant for centuries and then flower in the most unpromising soil.

I consider it an extremely dangerous doctrine, because the more likely we are to assume that the solution comes from the outside, the less likely we are to solve our problems ourselves.

The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.

I would suggest that science is, at least in my part, informed worship.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Science is a way to not fool ourselves.

Writing is the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another.

Writing is the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another.

The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together.

Science is an attempt, largely successful, to understand the world, to get a grip on things, to get hold of ourselves, to steer a safe course.

Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works.

Our ancestors lived out of doors. They were as familiar with the night sky as most of us are with our favorite television programs.

Learn to use your brains as deftly as your powder box, and then maybe you have a powder box and do not need.

The brain, is the most complex thing we have yet discovered in our universe.

When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains, and the women come out to cut up what remains, jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains and go to your god like a soldier.

If critics have problems with my personal life, it’s their problem. Anybody with half a brain would realize that it’s the charts that count.

What I appreciate is acknowledging to the audience that I think they have brains.

To count – really and truly to count – a woman must have goodness or brains.

It is essential to understand our brains in some detail if we are to assess correctly our place in this vast and complicated universe we see all around us.

If I’m not writing about myself, then I sit down with people I really dig writing with and throw ’em out and see if something sticks. Their brain plus mine hopefully will make something interesting and cool and it will just snowball and we’ll have a unique song by the end of it.