Music seems hard-wired into our very being. It moves us, stirs us to action, sets us in motion, sticks in our memories and minds.
If you do not know the names of things, the knowledge of them is lost, too.
To one who is accustomed to thinking a lot, every new thought that he hears or reads about immediately appears as a link in a chain.
I am left with no choice but to acknowledge the existence of a superior Intellect, responsible for the design and development of the incredible brain-mind relationship... I have to believe all this had an intelligent beginning.
The only living language is the language in which we think and have our being.
The real tight interface is between the book and the reader-the world of the book is plugged right into your brain, never mind the [virtual reality] bodysuit.
The art of remembering is the art of thinking. When we wish to fix a new thing in either our own mind or a pupil's, our conscious effort should not be so much to impress and retain it as to connect it with something else already there. The connecting is the thinking; and, if we attend clearly to the connection, the connected thing will certainly be likely to remain within recall.
[Presently, science undergraduates] do not learn to write clearly and briefly, marshalling their points in due and aesthetically satisfying order, and eliminating inessentials. They are inept at those turns of phrase or happy analogy which throw a flying bridge across a chasm of misunderstanding and make contact between mind and mind.
Books exist for me not as physical entities with pages and binding, but in the province of my mind.
Some years ago I wrote a book called The House on Eccles Street. To write this book I had to think my way into the existence of Marion Bloom...Marion Bloom was a figment of James Joyce's imagination. If I can think my way into the existence of a being who has never existed, then I can think my way into the existence of a bat or a chimpanzee or an oyster, any being with whom I share the substrate of life.
Complete peace equally reigns between two mental waves.
But love, first learned in a lady's eyes, Lives not alone immured in the brain; But, with the motion of all elements, Courses as swift as thought in every power, And gives to every power a double power, Above their functions and their offices.
At the breakfast table we are footnoting everything that we read. We don't recognise it as such but we encounter an article in the newspaper and then suddenly we recall that a friend had a certain comment on that particular story, a certain bit of news that we saw on the television applies to that and we immediately assemble an idea of a story.
It's a strange thing, but you get this click in your brain; the wonderful feeling that the entirety of a character is suddenly available and accessible to you.
Only after I've seen the visible can I imagine what the invisible is.
So what rhyming poems do is they take all these nearby sound curves and remind you that they first existed that way in your brain. Before they meant something specific, they had a shape and a way of being said. And now, yes, gloom and broom are floating fifty miles away from each other in you mind because they refer to different notions, but they're cheek-by-jowl as far as your tongue is concerned. And that's what a poem does. Poems match sounds up the way you matched them when you were a tiny kid, using that detachable front phoneme.
Is the ground a philosophical concept? Has mind a relationship to the ground? Is it an idea to be investigated? Is the ground put together by thought?
Reading is entering into the consciousness of another human being.
I like to laze around. I think that's a huge part of creativity. You have to let your mind relax and then another part of your brain suddenly connects with the solution you're trying to find.
All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it.
The human brain is the most public organ on the face of the earth, open to everything, sending out messages to everything. To be sure, it is hidden away in bone and conducts internal affairs in secrecy, but virtually all the business is the direct result of thinking that has already occurred in other minds.
Creativity and lateral thinking have exactly the same basis as humour.
Writing is still a bit of a miracle - the whole process: I see the world, filter the world, write down abstract squiggles on a page which somebody is then able to connect with. I'm still amazed by it and think I always will be.
There must be something innate about maps, about this one specific way of picturing our world and our relation to it, that charms us, calls to us, won’t let us look anywhere else in the room if there’s a map on the wall.
What I really like to learn how to do is to build sentences that are equal to mental states.
