Bernard Beckett

“Human spirit is the ability to face the uncertainty of the future with curiosity and optimism. It is the belief that problems can be solved, differences resolved. It is a type of confidence. And it is fragile. It can be blackened by fear and superstition.”

“Unable to attribute misfortune to chance, unable to accept their ultimate insignificance within the greater scheme, the people looked for monsters in their midst.”

“I write with teenagers in mind.”

“I just love the idea that people disappear into the story for a while. You grab a book, and you want to get back to it, and your life becomes a bit of an interruption. I would love readers to feel like that.”

“Superstition is the need to view the world in terms of simple cause and effect.”

“I am not a machine. For what can a machine know of the smell of wet grass in the morning, or the sound of a crying baby? I am the feeling of the warm sun against my skin; I am the sensation of a cool wave breaking over me. I am the places I have never seen, yet imagine when my eyes are closed. I am the taste of another's breath, the color of her hair.You mock me for the shortness of my life span, but it is this very fear of dying which breathes life into me. I am the thinker who thinks of thought. I am curiosity, I am reason, I am love, and I am hatred. I am indifference. I am the son of a father, who in turn was a father’s son. I am the reason my mother laughed and the reason my mother cried. I am wonder and I am wondrous. Yes, the world may push your buttons as it passes through your circuitry. But the world does not pass through me. It lingers. I am in it and it is in me. I am the means by which the universe has come to know itself. I am the thing no machine can ever make. I am meaning.”

“I can't see any great evidence that humans have any ability to access anything other than the material world. Beyond that, who knows, but there's no good evidence that would take me to any particular belief.”

“I respond well to what I read of Immanuel Kant's idea that the world as we see it is absolutely a function of the way our brain works. In the modern parlance, it's an evolved machine that we carry with us.”

“I like the concept of teenagers and philosophy.”

“But time passes. Fear becomes a memory. Terror becomes routine it loses its grip.”

“There is a fascination with fear. It grabs our attention.”

“Which came first, the mind or the idea of the mind? Have you never wondered? They arrived together. The mind is an idea.”

“The Idea enters the brain from the outside. It rearranges the furniture to make it more to its liking. It finds other Ideas already in residence, and picks fights or forms alliances. The alliances build new structures, to defend themselves against intruders.”

“The successful Idea travels from mind to mind, claiming new territory, mutating as it goes.”

“I didn't study science beyond high school level, but I'd been reading a lot of science books by people like Richard Dawkins, Matt Ridley and Daniel Dennett. I also spent a year working on a fellowship in a research centre - the Allan Wilson Centre - where I got a hands-on look at their work sequencing DNA.”

“In the end, living is defined by dying.”

“... from our vantage point it is now clear that the only thing the population had to fear was fear itself.”

“Our world is limited by the machinery we carry. It's very different to the 18th and 19th century Enlightenment scientists who were mostly men of God and thought it was their quest to uncover God's great plan.”

“Science is a little bit more than a wonderful way of modelling and predicting; it's a wonderful technical abstraction. I think science is a really wonderful technical abstraction.”

“I'm a school teacher, and later on, well past my formal education, I became very interested in science.”