It is much more meaningful and enjoyable to read the scientific literature about experiments you are involved in yourself than to read about science … - Eric Kandel

I entered Harvard to become a historian and left to become a psychoanalyst, only to abandon both... to follow my intuition that the road to a real understanding of mind must pass through the cellular pathways of the brain.

I was astonished to discover that working in the laboratory—doing science in collaboration with interesting and creative people—is dramatically different from taking courses and reading about science.

I was very much influenced by the psychology of Freud and by early workers in the field of learning and memory—James, Thorndike, Pavlov, Skinner, and Ulric Neisser. Their thinking, and even their errors, provided a wonderfully rich cultural background for my later work.