Tim Penn

"legend of Daniel Katzen, the horn player who auditioned 48 times before finally landing a spot with the BSO in 1979." - Tim Penn

"Everyone is composed from different things,,,A little severity, a little kindness, a little darkness, a little anger... Going by the laws of statistics, some people may be made of 100 % of the same stuff.,.like they were pure elements from the periodic table of feelings, you see? Well that's exactly it. My roomate is 100% dark." - Tim Penn

Children with genius levels of musical talent will always find a way to flourish, despite opposition or deprivation; and those from families where music is already present will have countless opportunities (even if sometimes with coercion) to learn an instrument – the BBC Young Musician competition has been the rich showcase for such lucky young people for more than 30 years now. But what about the rest? That political leaders are willing to be proactive in this area is something to be celebrated, because change will not happen by itself. The ubiquitous low culture, the inaccessibility of instruments and teachers, peer pressure, schoolwork pressures, the generation gaps, the blare and glare of technology's latest gadgets – all of these make it more difficult for children to begin studying the violin or horn, or to persevere beyond discouragement or boredom. - Tim Penn

"How did this failure happen? Endocrine thinking in psychiatry rode a wave of great excitement in the 1970s and 1980s, and then it seeped away. Few clinicians today are curious about cortisol or thyroid-releasing hormone, two hormones with intimate relationships to behavior. While physicians might include assays of thyroid hormones when requesting laboratory tests, they are often incurious about the results unless a blood measure is wildly out of balance. As for the complex interrelationships among hypothalamus, pituitary, adrenal gland, and the rest of it, that material is learned once during medical school and rarely considered again thereafter." - Tim Penn

""I like the thoughts in the Ferguson book, although I’m not sure I’d call them an “extension” as much as an “application” of the basic ideas, in the same way that the “but for” concept in law is an application of these ideas in damages suits. And again, the point I keep making about the label “counterfactual” isn’t really right, because at the time of the decision, neither world is counterfactual, only the inference from data involves counterfactuals: e.g., how can I design a study to observe counterfactuals? — this makes no sense. "" - Tim Penn

"At some point during 1986, I made the decision to be a writer and to do so absolutely. Rather than having a go, or trying, or tiptoeing forward, I decided to write as well as I could. This was, in a way, an extreme decision and an open invitation to risk, because if I really threw everything I had into writing and got nowhere, then I would be definitively No Good At It. I hadn't worked out that going halfway into writing (or any art, or anything else worthwhile) wouldn't be safe, it would be a guarantee of failure. " - Tim Penn