"A placebo is a phony cure that works. This is very hard for the medical profession to get their teet..." — Charles Jencks

I was already writing about the idea of a 'multiverse' in the 1970s, though I might have called it the 'pluriverse.' How was I to know it would turn out to be the standard model? Actually, I consider myself an enlightenment fossil.

I think any cancer patient, if you dig not too deeply, they want to live.

The singular point of beautiful objects, and people, is that they are experienced not as parts, or ratios between cheekbones and chin, but as wholes. The experience of beauty is a perception, but it is one that mixes up various other sensations and makes them converge in a particular way.

Beautiful people are always with us, as evolutionary psychologists and a trip to the news-stand confirm.