Oliver Sacks Quotes

You wouldn't know it, but I'm no good at recognising people; I have face blindness.

I have a great deal of difficulty recognizing faces, especially if I haven't - if I've just met somebody, it's hopeless.

I have facial blindness. It's hugely embarrassing as it makes me seem supercilious or snobbish.

So I swear to God, I took one year where I just said, This year, I'm just going to cop to it and say to people, 'Okay, where did we meet?' But it just got worse. People were more offended. Every now and then, someone will give me context, and I'll say, 'Thank you for helping me.' But I piss more people off. You get this thing, like, 'You're being egotistical. You're being conceited.' But it's a mystery to me, man. I can't grasp a face and yet I come from such a design/aesthetic point of view. I am going to get it tested.

The type of Alzheimer's Dad has is rare - posterior cortical atrophy or PCA - and it affects his spatial awareness and the way he judges distance. His first symptoms were erratic typing and spelling, but to talk to him, you'd never know there was a problem.

One can, in principle, outline sort of a set of neural circuits that are critically involved and even identify disorders that affect different components of that neural circuit and see what happens if you knock out, for example, inability to recognize faces, how it affects your response to portraiture.

It's thought that about 96% of us have visual imagery, and there's a very tiny minority in the population, some of whom are normal, some of whom have brain lesions, who cannot produce visual imagery.

I'm dyslexic, I have attention-deficit disorder, and I've got something like a hereditary tremor.

My girlfriend says I have frontal-lobe epilepsy. I have visions. They have slowed down as I've gotten older, but I still have them.

Where does personality end and brain damage begin?

One has to understand the functioning of the normal brain before studying the badly malfunctioning brain.

Once upon a time, there was a boy who didn't like himself very much. It was not his fault. He was born with cerebral palsy. Cerebral palsy is something that happens to the brain. It means that you can think but sometimes can't walk, or even talk.

A man cannot paint portraits till he has seen faces.

I still have a struggle reading (dyslexia, fh) and so I don't read much.. ..Probably the only reason I'm painter is because I couldn't read yet I love to write, but when I write I know what I'm writing, but when I'm reading I can't see it, because it goes from all sides of the page at once. But that's very good for printmaking.

I'm such a jerk; it had never occurred to me that when we look at a photo from the front, the eyes reproduce exactly the position and the vision of the lens; it's these things that are taken for granted and it never occurs to anyone to think about them.

The eye is not open when it is limited to the passive role of a mirror... if it has only the capacity to reflect.

Mel Bochner was able to give me the tools to look at those types of experiences, register them with my own, but also hold them far enough away to see them 360.

I have terrible short-term memory loss, which I like to think of as Presidential eligibility.

By happy chance we saw A twofold image: on a grassy bank A snow-white ram, and in the crystal flood Another and the same!

A lot of people say they are dyslexic; some have to realize that they are just stupid.

I've got to tell you, I've got 99 problems, and palsy is just one.

The eye, like a shattered mirror, multiplies the images of sorrow

No one has schizophrenia, like having a cold. The patient has not "got" schizophrenia. He is schizophrenic.

I say, Watson,’ he whispered, ‘would you be afraid to sleep in the same room as a lunatic, a man with softening of the brain, an idiot whose mind has lost its grip?’ ‘Not in the least,’ I answered in astonishment. ‘Ah, that’s lucky,’ he said, and not another word would he utter that night.

I turned back to the mirror, seeing that there were no lines on it. It was empty. "What happened to my mirror?" I said, bewildered. Then realizing that I was looking at the back of the dumb thing, I swore and turned it over.