All Quotes

"It is impossible, and it has always been impossible, to grasp the meaning of what we nowadays call physics independently of its mathematical form."

"There is no doubt... that mathematicians are generally overzealous about conciseness, and in their passion for brevity indulge in symbols even where these seem no better than a familiar English word or phrase. A faulty judgement has caused mathematicians to equate elegance and conciseness at the cost of intelligibility."

"Electromagnetic theory is entirely a mathematical theory illustrated by a few crude physical pictures. These pictures are no more than the clothes that dress up the body of mathematics and make it appear presentable in the society of sciences. ...Though he [James Clerk Maxwell] had tried desperately to build a physical account of electromagnetic phenomena, in his classic Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism he omitted most of this material and emphasized the highly polished, complex mathematical theory. ...Radio waves and light waves operate in a physical darkness illuminated only for those who would carry the torch of mathematics."

"One of the curious things about mathematics that clearly emerges... is that mathematics which is concerned with reasoning nevertheless creates processes which can be applied almost mechanically, that is, without reasoning. The thinking is, so to speak, mechanized and this mechanization enables us to solve complicated problems in no time. We think up processes so that we don't have to think."

"It is impossible to be a mathematician without being a poet in soul."

"There is no mathematical substitute for philosophy."

"It is a well-known experience that the only truly enjoyable and profitable way of studying mathematics is the method of "filling in details" by one's own efforts."

"Every true mathematician sees mathematics everywhere—in a child's swing or a pendulum, in the outline shape of a tree and that of its leaves, in the clouds"

"There is a temptingly simple explanation for the fact that science is mathematical in nature: it is because we give the name of science to those areas of intellectual inquiry that yield to mathematical analysis. ...Science ...deals with precisely those subjects amenable to quantitative analysis, and that is why mathematics is the appropriate language... The puzzle becomes a tautology: mathematics is the language of science because we reserve the name "science" for anything that mathematics can handle. If it's not mathematical, to some degree at least, it isn't really science."

"There is no branch of mathematics, however abstract, which may not some day be applied to phenomena of the real world."

"The only thing I am interested in using mathematics for is to have a good time and to help others do the same."

"You should not choose to do mathematics if you want to make money; your salary as a mathematician will never correspond to the amount of time and energy invested in your work."

"You know I always have so many metaphysical enquiries & speculations which intrude themselves, that I never am really satisfied that I understand anything; because, understand it as well as I may, my comprehension can only be an infinitesimal fraction of all I want to understand about the many connexions & relations which occur to me, how the matter in question was first thought of or arrived at, &c., &c."

"I have not in every case been able to avoid the use of the abbreviated and precise terminology of mathematics. To do so would have been to sacrifice matter to form; for the language of everyday life has not yet grown to be sufficiently accurate for the purposes of so exact a science as mechanics."

"All there is in the three worlds, moving or unmoving, all that cannot be described without mathematics."

"Think of it: of the infinity of real numbers, those that are most important to mathematics—0, 1, √2, e and π—are located within less than four units on the number line. A remarkable coincidence? A mere detail in the Creator's grand design? I let the reader decide."

"I could only see myself making a living through writing, as I had done in China. But should I write in Chinese here, a foreign land, or enrol in a language class and study English grammar? If I continued to write in Chinese I would have no readers here. Besides, I would never create a community of fellow artists and thinkers in my Western life while speaking Chinese."

"Please write again soon. Though my own life is filled with activity, letters encourage momentary escape into others lives and I come back to my own with greater contentment."

"Good writers indulge their audience; great writers know better."

"The first person you should think of pleasing, in writing a book, is yourself. If you can amuse yourself for the length of time it takes to write a book, the publishers and the readers can and will follow."

"I don’t think about rules when I’m writing – that’s the great thing about writing: it’s the one place in my life that I can do whatever I want."

"Intellectually as well as emotionally he (Nietzsche) needed solitude. This fact emerges, I believe, from the manner of thinking and style of writing revealed in his books, which are essentially a species of talking to oneself. … He is a man whose mind is full, overfull, of ideas; he is constantly finding ways of expressing them which, as he says in his letters, surprise and delight him; he spends much of each day walking, and at night he sits crouched over his table; and all the time he is talking to himself. He loves his own company, for with no one else can he enjoy such entertaining conversation. Sometimes he contradicts himself, but what would conversation be without contradiction? He argues, he grows angry, he laughs at himself; he postures and exposes himself as a posturer; he announces he is the freest of free-thinkers, and retorts that free-thinking is mere destructiveness. Gradually a philosophy emerges, his philosophy: none of it is of any use to anyone, no one is even interested in it; but one day — so he tells himself — mankind will open its eyes and see that a new world has been discovered."

"He wins every hand who mingles profit with pleasure, by delighting and instructing the reader at the same time."

"murderous signs, scratched in a folded tablet, and many of them too, enough to kill a man."

"There rise authors now and then, who seem proof against the mutability of language, because they have rooted themselves in the unchanging principles of human nature."

"If it was easy, everyone would do it rather than going around telling you their ideas and saying how they could be a writer if they had the time."

"Writing is nothing less than thought transference, the ability to send one's ideas out into the world, beyond time and distance, taken at the value of the words, unbound from the speaker."

"The present writer ... writes because for him it is a luxury that becomes all the more enjoyable and conspicuous the fewer who buy and read what he writes."

"For me, writing is an act of reciprocity with the world; it is what I can give back in return for everything that has been given to me."

"You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair — the sense that you can never completely put on the page what's in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page."

"The job of the writer is to kiss no ass, no matter how big and holy and white and tempting and powerful."

"A preface is a species of literary luxury, where an author, like a lover, is privileged to be egotistical."

"I have been writing all my life, and even now I do not understand the faculty of composition; but this I do know, that the history of the circumstances under which most books are written would be a frightful picture of human suffering. How often is the pen taken up when the hand is unsteady with recent sickness, and bodily pain is struggled against, and sometimes in vain! How often is the page written hurriedly and anxiously,—the mind fevered the while by the consciousness that it is not doing justice to its powers!"

"Advice to writers: Sometimes you just have to stop writing. Even before you begin."

"A writer is like God. He can destroy empires, create new universes."

"He is no parasite on anything, whose work is real: a mechanic, a doctor, a builder, a tailor, a dishwasher. What, in comparison, does a writer produce? Semblances. This is a serious occupation?"

"I love physics, but what was even more important to me was leading a creative life ... And I knew that writers could continue doing their best work later in life.”"

"If I may, I would at this point urge young writers not to be too much concerned with the vagaries of the marketplace. Not everyone can make a first-rate living as a writer, but a writer who is serious and responsible about his work, and life, will probably find a way to earn a decent living, if he or she writes well. A good writer will be strengthened by his good writing at a time, let us say, of the resurgence of ignorance in our culture. I think I have been saying that the writer must never compromise with what is best in him in a world defined as free."

"what’s a writer for? The whole point is to put yourself into other lives, other heads—writers have always done that. If you screw up, so someone will tell you, that’s all. I think men can write about women and women can write about men. The whole point is to know the facts. Men have so often written about women without knowing the reality of their lives, and worse, without being interested in that daily reality."

"The best training is to read and write, no matter what. Don’t live with a lover or roommate who doesn’t respect your work. Don’t lie, buy time, borrow to buy time. Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write."

"I have written almost all my life. My writing has drawn, out of a reluctant soul, a measure of astonishment at the nature of life. And the more I wrote well, the better I felt I had to write. In writing I had to say what had happened to me, yet present it as though it had been magically revealed. I began to write seriously when I had taught myself the discipline necessary to achieve what I wanted. When I touched that time, my words announced themselves to me. I have given my life to writing without regret, except when I consider what in my work I might have done better. I wanted my writing to be as good as it must be, and on the whole I think it is. I would write a book, or a short story, at least three times — once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose, and a third to compel it to say what it still must say. Somewhere I put it this way: first drafts are for learning what one's fiction wants him to say. Revision works with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to re-form it. Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing: The men and things of today are wont to lie fairer and truer in tomorrow's meadow, Henry Thoreau said. I don't regret the years I put into my work. Perhaps I regret the fact that I was not two men, one who could live a full life apart from writing; and one who lived in art, exploring all he had to experience and know how to make his work right; yet not regretting that he had put his life into the art of perfecting the work."

"Premeditated details arrive, when you're writing, and my instinct is always to reach for the nearest weapon."

"A rule says "You must do it this way". A principle says, "This works... and has through all remembered time." The difference is crucial. Your work needn't be modeled after the well-made play; rather it must be well made within the principles that shape our art. Anxious, inexperienced writers obey rules. Rebellious, unschooled writers break rules. Artists master the form."

"I turned to writing full time in my middle fifties, in part to learn a few of those many things one never has time for in a conventional career … I enjoy trying to write simply, freshly and directly about subjects that specialized experts tend to deal with in jargon."

"If you steal from one author, it's plagiarism. If you steal from two, it's research."

"Sadly, reading and writing are, at least in part, the victims of a television and internet culture that has effectively encumbered the minds of people. This is problematic because, without reading, it becomes difficult to think analytically and imaginatively about the world’s problems and issues, and it hampers the development of appropriate responses and solutions. Lack of reading also often results in the uncritical acceptance of political slogans which, while they appear plausible, are ultimately devoid of merit."

"The reason I got into magic was that it seemed to be what was lying at the end of the path of writing. If I wanted to continue on that path, I was going to have to get into that territory because I had followed writing as far as I thought I could without taking a step over the edges of rationality. The path led out of rational confines. When you start thinking about art and creativity, rationality is not big enough to contain it all."

"I don’t distinguish between magic and art. When I got into magic, I realised I had been doing it all along, ever since I wrote my first pathetic story or poem when I was twelve or whatever. This has all been my magic, my way of dealing with it."

"You can always count on a murderer for fancy prose style."

"You ask me why I do not write something....I think one's feelings waste themselves in words, they ought all to be distilled into actions and into actions which bring results."