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In centenarians and supercentenarians - people over 110 - you see a higher level of fecundity much later in life.

You can open up a centenarian's brain, and you'll see some areas that look like that of a 50-year-old or of a 110-year-old. You can have variation in the basic process of aging, called senescence, in different parts of the same body.

Very few minds are strictly normal, and all religious fanatics are marked with abnormalities of various sorts.

I seem to be thinking rationally again in the style that is characteristic of scientists. However, this is not entirely a matter of joy, as if someone returned from physical disability to good physical health. One aspect of this is that rationality of thought imposes a limit on a person's concept of his relation to the cosmos.

We realise that natural aptitudes are not interchangeable, and each person must, of biological or spiritual necessity, practise the art for which he is fitted.

The most gifted natures are perhaps also the most trembling.

I seem to be thinking rationally again in the style that is characteristic of scientists. However, this is not entirely a matter of joy as if someone returned from physical disability to good physical health.

I had a prodigious life, living in a grown-up world when I was a child. But I think my abilities were about perceptiveness, and they were about examining psychology and examining people and relationships.

We have a habit of turning to scientists when we want factual answers and artists when we want entertainment, but where are the facts about the nature of the self? Neurologists peering at PET scans and fMRIs know they aren't seeing the soul in there.

Brain surgeons are dealing with the very last thread of life, and they have to be very confident, but I think they tend to remember their failures rather than their successes, and that must be very hard. Who do you share that failure with? That's why their personal lives are often disastrous.