Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking of it.

Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.

The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained.

The world makes much less sense than you think. The coherence comes mostly from the way your mind works.

The premise of this book is that it is easier to recognize other people's mistakes than our own.

The test of learning psychology is whether your understanding of situations you encounter has changed, not whether you have learned a new fact.

Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.

Many parents have discovered, perhaps with some guilt, that they can read a story to a child while thinking of something else.

Freedom has a cost, which is borne by individuals who make bad choices, and by a society that feels obligated to help them.

The often-used phrase “pay attention” is apt: you dispose of a limited budget of attention that you can allocate to activities, and if you try to you try to go beyond your budget, you will fail.

However, attention can be moved away from an unwanted focus, primarily by focusing intently on another target.

Intuition represents a concept which is made up from lots of ideas and assumptions, not all of which will be common to everyone.

I must have flowers, always and always.

There are worse things than eating the dead, my dear fellow. Far worse things. There is, for instance, making a huge profit out of their funeral, which is the normal custom in the civilized world.

Downplaying their faults is pretty much the point of campaigns. But we do count on them living with the constant terror of public rejection.

To achieve your dreams, you must embrace adversity and make failure a regular part of your life. If you're not failing, you're probably not really moving forward.

I'm always going to be a student. I'm always learning. I'm always trying to grow. I'm always trying to understand. I never want to feel like I've arrived.

You can make a little thing feel like a big thing. To me, it's all tone. Tone is the most important thing in the world. Then character, then story, or something like that.

I know we just met today, but I gotta see you tomorrow. I know this is our first date, I don't expect you to swallow.

I glory in the fact that a human being has multiple talents and exercises them all with a degree of integrity and artistic proficiency. That's what I do.

When it hurts to look back, and you're afraid to look ahead, you can look beside you and your best friend will be there.