The Most Purely Autobiographical ­fiction Requires Pure

And Silence Of The Lambs Is A Really Smart Book.

It's Very Liberating For Me To Realize That I Don't Have To Step Up To The Plate With A Plot That Involves The U.n. Security Council.

Our Visual Cortexes Are Wired To Quickly Recognize Faces And Then Quickly Subtract Massive Amounts Of Detail From Them, Zeroing In On Their Essential Message: Is This Person Happy? Angry? Fearful? Individual Faces May Vary Greatly, But A Smirk On One Is A Lot Like A Smirk On Another. Smirks Are Conceptual, Not Pictorial. Our Brains Are Like Cartoonists - And Cartoonists Are Like Our Brains, Simplifying And Exaggerating, Subordinating Facial Detail To Abstract Comic Concepts.

I Think We Live In An Era Of Problems That, If You Step Back And Look At Them Globally, Can't Be Solved. One Response To That Is, "oh Well, It's All Hopeless. The Natural World Is Getting Wrecked, Birds Are Disappearing, The Planet Is Warming And So Anything We Might Do On A Smaller Scale Is Meaningless."

And When The Event, The Big Change In Your Life, Is Simply An Insight-- Isn't That A Strange Thing? That Absolutely Nothing Changes Except That You See Things Differently And You're Less Fearful And Less Anxious And Generally Stronger As A Result: Isn't It Amazing That A Completely Invisible Thing In Your Head Can Feel Realer Than Anything You've Experienced Before?