My fans want me to talk to them. And even if they want to be critical, I want to hear what they've got to say.

I wouldn't want to donate my body for scientific study.

But when I was a little kid, I was always writing stories and illustrating little books that I would create.

If everybody, every day, would try to do one thing that pulls them beyond themselves the world will start being a better place.

Science isn't just about solving this or that puzzle. It's about understanding how the world works: the whole world from the vastness of the cosmos to the particularity of an individual human life. It's worth thinking about how all the different ways we have to talk about the world manage to fit together.

Modern scientific knowledge appeared piecemeal. Historians wrote about human history; physicists tackled the material world; and biologists studied the world of living organisms. But there were few links between these disciplines, as researchers focused on getting the details right.

If the history of resistance to Darwinian thinking is a good measure, we can expect that long into the future, long after every triumph of human thought has been matched or surpassed by 'mere machines,' there will still be thinkers who insist that the human mind works in mysterious ways that no science can comprehend.

It's important to let kids be themselves and to let them make mistakes. Self-discovery goes a long way.