In fiction the story lives the more everyone comes to life, the more each character seems to exist in his or her own right..

I think like almost everything in evolution, the old forms persist. New forms come along - not always, of course; there are species and whole lineage….

Popper and Nabokov are very different people in some ways - and I'm ready to devote large chunks of my life to both of them. Popper didn't think much….

Literature and the other arts play with pattern - our brains understand our world by recognizing patterns - and with possibility. The arts harness ou….

There is behavioral ecology, which looks closely at the difference different ecologies make to behavior and other features of animals and humans. The….

Perhaps the most demanding trick in all of art is to know ways that are going to capture the attention of an audience right now, and yet to also hold….

Any artist who really engages with the problems in their medium at that moment and tries to deepen the problems is likely to discover new problems, n….

I think that's an important part of art in general. Especially in literature, in stories, we play with eventualities that may put us through a lot of….

If an artwork never gets any attention from anybody, then obviously it's got problems. If it gains attention from a very small elite, then it's presu….

Scientists, to give them credit, do not think of the humanities in a negative way. It's the bureaucrats who want to cut costs who think, Well, here's….

Social media takes time and careful, strategic thought. It doesn't happen by accident..

There's a young Danish guy who has done a lot of work from an evolutionary perspective, Mathias Clasen. Basically, his argument is we've evolved to f….

It seems to me to make as much sense to talk about literature as a large-scale human phenomenon without bringing in evolution as it does to engage in….

I would be very surprised if on another planet we discovered a species as intelligent as humans that didn't have narrative, or didn't have art in gen….

I guess both Nabokov and Popper had, in different ways, immunized me against the fashion for French-influenced literary theory in the '70s, '80s, and….

Literature often gets taught nowadays as a record of the sins and shortcomings of the past. I see literature and the arts very differently: as essent….

Everything is humanities. The sciences are a form of the humanities. They involve traditions of inquiry; they involve social engagement with ideas. T….

Social media is your opportunity to reach a massive number of people with transparency, honesty, and integrity..

Art and literature need extreme sociality to a degree that even dolphins don't have. We are the only large mammalian species that has such intense so….