"The three-pound organ in your skull - with its pink consistency of Jell-o - is an alien kind of computational material. It is composed of miniaturized, self-configuring parts, and it vastly outstrips anything we've dreamt of building."

"I know one lab that studies nicotine receptors and all the scientists are smokers, and another lab that studies impulse control and they're all overweight."

"As an undergraduate I majored in British and American literature at Rice University."

"I'm using the afterlife as a backdrop against which to explore the joys and complexities of being human - it turns out that it's a great lens with which to understand what matters to us."

"I just don't want to die alone, that's all. That's not too much to ask for, is it It would be nice to have someone care about me, for who I am, not about my wallet."

"Man cannot live by bread alone he must have peanut butter."

"We are rarely proud when we are alone."

"Following the end of the Cold War, there was much discussion concerning the point of NATO. In the event, it was reinvented as a means of reducing Russia's reach on its western frontiers and seeking to isolate it. Its former East European client states were admitted to NATO, as were the Baltic states."