David Quotes

I've never really told jokes. I'm not good at it.

So I think a writer should write what he loves, the people he relates to.

The way I personally work is I like to write what I know, what I feel, and also where I am.

My court skills may have atrophied.

I don't think it's that strange that a show has sort of a bumpy beginning. It's just part and parcel of the process.

But Steven Bochco was smart; he knew that viewers were smart.

I don't think I could write a straight drama.

When the stories come easily and the writing process doesn't feel laboring, that's usually a good sign for me.

The more lawyers there are, the more people are out there to encourage others not to go to law school.

The world sees peace as the absence of conflict or pain, but Jesus offers us solace despite our suffering.

Temples stand as a constant physical reminder of the grace and goodness of the Father.

We are not the ones driving the boat of our behavior, at least not nearly as much as we believe.

Knowing yourself now requires the understanding that the conscious you occupies only a small room in the mansion of the brain, and that it has little control over the reality constructed for you.

The majority of human beings live their whole lives unaware that they are only seeing a limited cone of vision at any moment.

All life is no more than a match struck in the dark and blown out again.

As Carl Jung put it, "In each of us there is another whom we do not know." As Pink Floyd sang, "There's someone in my head, but it's not me."

The first thing we learn from studying our own circuitry is a simple lesson: most of what we do and think and feel is not under our conscious control.

Once you begin deliberating about where your fingers are jumping on the piano keyboard, you can no longer pull off the piece.

Nothing is inherently tasty or repulsive - it depends on your needs. Deliciousness is simply an index of usefulness.

Consciousness is the smallest player in the operations of the brain.

One of the most pervasive mistakes is to believe that our visual system gives a faithful representation of what is "out there" in the same way that a movie camera would.

Keep in mind that every single generation before us has worked under the assumption that they possessed all the major tools for understanding the universe, and they were all wrong, without exception.

Brains are like representative democracies. They are built of multiple, overlapping experts who weigh in and compete over different choices.

Visual cortex is fundamentally a machine whose job is to generate a model of the world.

Think about the brain as the densest concentration of youness. It's the peak of the mountain, but not the whole mountain.

This is what consciousness does: it sets the goals, and the rest of the system learns how to meet them.

If you are a carrier of a particular set of genes, your probability of committing a violent crime goes up by eight hundred and eighty-two percent.

One of the most impressive features of brains - and especially human brains - is the flexibility to learn almost any kind of task that comes its way.

Just give the brain the information and it will figure it out.

The brain runs its show incognito.

We spend our lives on a thin slice between the unimaginably small scales of the atoms that compose us and the infinitely large scales of galaxies.

The main thing known about secrets is that keeping them is unhealthy for the brain.

Given the billions of neurons, this means there are as many connections in a single cubic centimeter of brain tissue as there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

Vision is more than looking.

Awareness of your surroundings occurs only when sensory inputs violate expectations. When the world is successfully predicted away, awareness is not needed because the brain is doing its job well.

The drives you take for granted ("I'm a hetero/homosexual," "I'm attracted to children/adults," "I'm aggressive/not aggressive," and so on) depend on the intricate details of your neural machinery.

The more familiar the world becomes, the less information your brain writes down, and the more quickly time seems to pass.

Humans have discovered that they cannot stop Death, but at least they can spit in his drink.

You are part of a complex social network that changes your biology with every interaction, and which your actions can change.

Modern neuroimaging is like asking an astronaut in the space shuttle to look out the window and judge how America is doing.

As we develop better technologies for probing the brain, we detect more problems.

Asleep vision (dreaming) is perception that is not tied down to anything in the real world; waking perception is something like dreaming with a little more commitment to what's in front of you.

Interestingly, schizophrenics can tickle themselves because of a problem with their timing that does not allow their motor actions and resulting sensations to be correctly sequenced.

We are not at the center of ourselves, but instead - like the Earth in the Milky Way, and the Milky Way in the universe - far out on a distant edge, hearing little of what is transpiring.

Just like a good drama, the human brain runs on conflict.

If you ever feel lazy or dull, take heart: you're the busiest, brightest thing on the planet.

Evolve solutions; when you find a good one, don't stop.

A mere 400 years after our fall from the center of the universe, we have experienced the fall from the center of ourselves.

My lab and academic work fill my day from about 9 am to 7 p.m. Then I zoom out the lens to work on my other writing.

Everybody knows the power of deadlines - and we all hate them. But their effectiveness is undeniable.