We all know funny people who can't get it down on the page - even funny writers who can't get it down on the page.
I actually think of being funny as an odd turn of mind, like a mild disability, some weird way of looking at the world that you can't get rid of.
I think it would be funny for people to read in obituaries of me that my major contribution to the arts was the popularization of the phrases 'neutral facial expression' and 'screaming in agony.'
I believe alien life is quite common in the universe, although intelligent life is less so. Some say it has yet to appear on planet Earth.
We think that life develops spontaneously on Earth, so it must be possible for life to develop on suitable planets elsewhere in the universe. But we don't know the probability that a planet develops life.
Any psychology of sign systems will be part of social psychology - that is to say, will be exclusively social; it will involve the same psychology as is applicable in the case of languages.
The first of these phases is that of grammar, invented by the Greeks and carried on unchanged by the French. It never had any philosophical view of a language as such.
People don't walk away from their homes unless they can't make the payments. That's an indication that we are in a recession.
I always found the appeal to the market gods a bit odd. Why would the market fix mistakes instead of aggravating them?
Tolerance, like any aspect of peace, is forever a work in progress, never completed, and, if we're as intelligent as we like to think we are, never abandoned.
Most of the time, we think fast. And most of the time we're really expert at what we're doing, and most of the time, what we do is right.
Mental states of every kind, - sensations, feelings, ideas, - which were at one time present in consciousness and then have disappeared from it, have not with their disappearance absolutely ceased to exist.
I have always found women difficult. I don't really understand them. To begin with, few women tell the truth.
We talk about honesty, but the reality is we have lots of human values, and they are not all compatible. We don't always tell the truth about everything, no matter what the consequences.
As scientists, we step on the shoulders of science, building on the work that has come before us - aiming to inspire a new generation of young scientists to continue once we are gone.
The most powerful men were those who most effectively used the power of adult competence to enforce childish agreements.
In many cases of inflammation, the vascular changes develop slowly and long after the application of the stimulus which is responsible for the inflammatory reaction.
In many organisms, including man, the mechanical respiration and the circulation of the blood are 'regulated' so as to correspond to the demand of the moment.
If your contribution has been vital there will always be somebody to pick up where you left off, and that will be your claim to immortality.
The shrewd guess, the fertile hypothesis, the courageous leap to a tentative conclusion - these are the most valuable coins of the thinker at work. But in most schools guessing is heavily penalized and is associated somehow with laziness.
I believe that all my work explores the human desire or obsession for utopias, and the structure of all my works is the search for utopias lost and rediscovered.
