I was not especially a writer back in college.

Do I get grief for the fact that in communicating, say, about the baboons I'm doing so much anthropomorphizing? One hopes that the parts that are blatantly ridiculous will be perceived as such. I've nonetheless been stunned by some of my more humorless colleagues - to see that they were not capable of recognizing that.

The notion of humans as inherently rational beings has been not only trashed in economics, but trashed in all the best research on moral decision-making.

Individuating and taking someone else's perspective can be very powerful.

I'm sort of a hippie pacifist in terms of general persona.

You know, I'm an egg-heady scientist with a large beard and like Birkenstocks.

Intellectually, I believe there's no free will.

Of necessity, a scientist typically studies one incredibly tiny sliver of some biological system, totally ensconced within one discipline, because even figuring out how one sliver works is really hard.

I think my becoming a writer had much to do with spending a chunk of each year sitting by myself out in a tent without radio, without newspapers, without a whole lot of people to interact with, without anybody having any sort of similar background to me.

If you're a gazelle, you don't have a very complex emotional life, despite being a social species. But primates are just smart enough that they can think their bodies into working differently. It's not until you get to primates that you get things that look like depression.

What adolescence is about is by trial and error, honing a frontal cortex that is going to be more optimal by the time you're 25.

Well, when I was a teenager I was terribly bookish. I was very studious.

My adolescent rebellions took the form of, if anything, passive aggressively doing what was asked of me but doing it ten times more than what was asked of me, so that eventually they'd have to beg me to stop.

My guess is that people with a stereotypically conservative exclusionary stance about immigration rarely have the sense that they feel disgusted that people elsewhere in the world would want to come to the United States for better lives. Instead, there is threat by the rabble, the unwashed masses, to the American way of life.

The key thing about us is that we all belong to multiple tribes. Even if we are predisposed into dividing the world into 'us' and 'them,' it's incredibly easy to manipulate us as to who is an 'us' and who is a 'them' at any given moment.

Ninety percent of what I'm listening to overall is like the same tape of Bob Marley's Greatest Hits. Like, how did I become one of those people on late night TV where they sell anthologies to you and you buy them?

I think you get to a time in life where by definition stuff's turning to quicksand and wherever you can get some solid footing of the familiar suddenly becomes real comforting.

I spend most of my time by being at a university, hanging out with very manic, excited 18-year-olds.

I think it is inevitable that we make Us/Them distinctions but there's nothing inevitable about who counts as a Them.

You don't want to end up telling somebody who's homeless or a refugee that stress is all perceptual, because it sure isn't in those cases. But most of us have fairly neurotic middle-class stressors.

I'm a professor of neuroscience at Stanford University, and I'm kind of half-neurobiologist, half-primatologist.

Show me one neuron that has some cellular semblance of free will. And there is no such neuron.

If we want to make sense of our behavior - all the best, worst, and everything in between - we're not going to get anywhere if we think it can all be explained with one thing, whether it's one part of the brain, one childhood experience, one hormone, one gene, or anything.

We like our individuality, we like the mysteriousness of us, the essentialism of us, and it can be alarming to see the biological gears turning underneath.

One definitely wants to have a functioning hippocampus. It's all about learning and memory, the part blown out of the water by Alzheimer's disease. It's also the part that is most vulnerable to the effects of stress.

If some baboons just happen to be good at seeing water holes as half full instead of half empty... we should be able to as well.

Baboons have the exact physiology as humans do. They also get the same stress-related illnesses, such as ulcers and heart disease.

Low socioeconomic status carries with it an enormously increased risk of a broad range of diseases, and this gradient cannot be fully explained by factors such as health-care access.

Sometimes I'll get to the end of a song, open my eyes and there's all these faces peering at me. It's quite horrifying.

For a period in the '90s, I felt that the Cure was massively undervalued. But there has been a paradigm shift. There's a bunch of newer bands coming up who've grown up listening to the Cure and don't understand that you're not supposed to like us.

I don't find the technology threatening. A lot of people my age, my generation, find it difficult to immerse themselves. But I would never preclude the idea of using any technology if I thought it suited the end result.

I honestly don't class myself as a songwriter. I've got 'musician' written on my passport. That's even funnier.

I think, at heart, unless you discover faith in something else, something other, it's very hard to shake the thing that you're adrift alone.

The problem as you get older is, from my perspective, after a certain amount of songs, you tend to start writing something and then you stop and say, 'Wait, I think I've written that before.'

I get a much more extreme reaction when I have my hair really short. I look thuggish when I shave my head and wear big boots. I walk into a newsagent and people think I'm going to jump the counter. It's a much more extreme reaction.

It has always seemed slightly uncomfortable, the idea of politicised musicians. Very few of them are clever enough to do it; if they're good at the political side, the music side suffers, and vice versa.

I never answer if someone knocks on my door and only the band and my manager have my phone number. In any case my phone doesn't ring so I never notice it. I occasionally just walk past and pick it up to see if anyone's there.

I wouldn't want to think people doted on us, hung on every word, or wanted to look like us.

Like I can't cry for myself so I will let this song take all of the things inside I can't let anyone else see and offer it up, as if the sound were some kind of god, and my pain is some kind of sacrifice.

You don't really know a song until you play it live.

I don't think of death in a romantic way anymore.

I'm not going to worry about the Cure slipping down into the second division; it doesn't bother me because I never expected to be in the first division anyway.

Each time I play a song it seems more real.

I had no desire to be famous; I just wanted to make the greatest music ever made. I didn't want anyone to know who I was.

I look thuggish when I shave my head and wear big boots. I walk into a newsagent and people think I'm going to jump the counter.

I married somebody who likes the way I look. If I changed my hair every year, and I reinvented myself in time-honoured pop fashion, I think understandably the person I'm married to would grow slightly sick of me.

Reading is something I've really missed, not being able to enter people's worlds.

I started out in the 'Cure' reflecting things that I thought were important, and it's reached a point where it takes over and becomes the thing that is important.

I've got a Facebook page, but I've never put anything on it. I've got a presence on all the social networks, in fact, but I've never once sent a message. I'm there because, otherwise, someone's going to pretend to be me.

Every animal would rather die themselves than lose their offspring. But it's just genes, isn't it? All of our existence is spent worrying about the next generation, but we don't actually seem to get anywhere.