“Doesn't our knowledge of death make life more precious?'What good is a preciousness based on fear and anxiety? It's an anxious quivering thing”

“Isn't death the boundary we need? Doesn't it give a precious texture to life, a sense of definition? You have to ask yourself whether anything you do in this life would have beauty and meaning without the knowledge you carry of a final line, a border or limit.”

“I have only a bare working knowledge of the human brain but it's enough to make me proud to be an American.”

“Every advance in knowledge and technique is matched by a new kind of death, a new strain. Death adapts, like a viral agent.”

“We all know how the thing we secretly fear is not a secret at all but the open and eternal thing that predicts its own recurrence.”

“Time and death: It's the ultimate vision of an artist at the end of everything. It's just what's there. It was not something I planned to do.”

“What good is knowledge if it just floats in the air? It goes from computer to computer. It changes and grows every second of every day. But nobody actually knows anything.”