All Quotes

"...I don't believe in the idea that there are a few peculiar people capable of understanding math and the rest of the world is normal. Math is a human discovery, and it's no more complicated than humans can understand. I had a calculus book once that said, "What one fool can do, another fool can." What we've been able to work out about nature may look abstract and threatening to someone who hasn't studied it, but it was fools who did it, and in the next generation, all the fools will understand it. There's a tendency to pomposity in all this, to make it all deep and profound..."

"...In that same period there was Newton, there was Harvey studying the circulation of the blood, there were people with methods of analysis by which progress was being made! You can take every one of Spinoza's propositions and take the contrary propositions and look at the world--and you can't tell which is right. Sure, people were awed because he had the courage to take on these great questions, but it doesn't do any good to have the courage if you can't get anywhere with the question..."

"I don't know anything, but I do know that everything is interesting if you go into it deeply enough."

"As soon as I arrived at Cornell, I became aware of Dick as the liveliest personality in our department. In many ways he reminded me of Frank Thompson. Dick was no poet and certainly no Communist. But he was like Frank in his loud voice, his quick mind, his intense interest in all kinds of things and people, his crazy jokes, and his disrespect for authority. I had a room in a student dormitory and sometimes around two o'clock in the morning I would wake up to the sound of a strange rhythm pulsating over the silent campus. That was Dick playing his bongo drums. Dick was also a profoundly original scientist. He refused to take anybody's word for anything. This meant that he was forced to rediscover or reinvent for himself almost the whole of physics. It took him five years of concentrated work to reinvent quantum mechanics. He said that he couldn't understand the official version of quantum mechanics that was taught in textbooks, and so he had to begin afresh from the beginning."

"D’Arline,I adore you, sweetheart. I know how much you like to hear that—but I don’t only write it because you like it—I write it because it makes me warm all over inside to write it to you. It is such a terribly long time since I last wrote to you—almost two years but I know you’ll excuse me because you understand how I am, stubborn and realistic; and I thought there was no sense to writing. But now I know my darling wife that it is right to do what I have delayed in doing, and what I have done so much in the past. I want to tell you I love you. I want to love you—I always will love you. I find it hard to understand in my mind what it means to love you after you are dead—but I still want to comfort and take care of you—and I want you to love me and care for me. I want to have problems to discuss with you—I want to do little projects with you. I never thought until just now that we can do that together. What should we do. We started to learn to make clothes together—or learn Chinese—or getting a movie projector. Can’t I do something now. No. I am alone without you and you were the "idea-woman" and general instigator of all our wild adventures. When you were sick you worried because you could not give me something that you wanted to and thought I needed. You needn't have worried. Just as I told you then there was no real need because I loved you in so many ways so much. And now it is clearly even more true—you can give me nothing now yet I love you so that you stand in my way of loving anyone else—but I want to stand there. You, dead, are so much better than anyone else alive. I know you will assure me that I am foolish and that you want me to have full happiness and don’t want to be in my way. I’ll bet that you are surprised that I don’t even have a girlfriend (except you, sweetheart) after two years. But you can’t help it, darling, nor can I—I don’t understand it, for I have met many girls and very nice ones and I don’t want to remain alone—but in two or three meetings they all seem ashes. You only are left to me. You are real.My darling wife, I do adore you.I love my wife. My wife is dead.RichP.S. Please excuse my not mailing this—but I don’t know your new address."

"[S]tudy hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible."

"The worthwhile problems are the ones you can really solve or help solve, the ones you can really contribute something to. … No problem is too small or too trivial if we can really do something about it. You say you are a nameless man. You are not to your wife and to your child. You will not long remain so to your immediate colleagues if you can answer their simple questions when they come into your office. You are not nameless to me. Do not remain nameless to yourself — it is too sad a way to be. Know your place in the world and evaluate yourself fairly, not in terms of the naïve ideals of your own youth, nor in terms of what you erroneously imagine your teacher's ideals are."

"Do not read so much, look about you and think of what you see there."

"Shut up and calculate!"

"Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it."

"The philosophy of science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds."

"In the hands of a Feynman the [variational] technique works like a Latin charm; with ordinary mortals the result is a mixed bag."

"People often ask me why I became an economist. In college and before that, I tended toward mathematics and science. As a physics major at Caltech in the early 1960s, I was lucky to take the two-year sequence taught to freshmen and sophomores the one and only time by the great Richard Feynman. (To prove this, I have a signed and leather-bound copy of the notes from his course.) Feynman's approach was to skip the standard topics in physics and use with frontier material. That was partly why many of the faculty and graduate students attended the course. It also meant that I learned early on what it would mean to be an actual physicist, and I decided pretty quickly that I would not be a great one. In retrospect, it was fortunate that I learned this so soon, rather than having to wait until my senior year or, perhaps, even to graduate school."

"Richard Feynman became so exasperated [at the National Academy of Sciences] that he resigned his membership, saying that he saw no point in belonging to an organization that spent most of its time deciding who to let in."

"This verse is for Richard Feynman. He was not a simple simon."

"Richard Feynman has related that at a meeting of the American Physical Society, likely sometime in 1956, he was chatting with Onsager when a wild-eyed young man came up to them and said that he had solved the problem of superconductivity. ... As Feyman relates, he could not understand what the young man was saying and concluded that the fellow was probably crazy. ... Feynman believed that the young man was me. I am not sure whether or not this meeting actually occurred, but it might have."

"Feynman uses Dirac's notation to describe the quantum mechanics of stimulated emission. ... He applies that physics to several physical systems, including dye molecules. ... In this regard, Feynman could have predicted the existence of the tunable laser. Furthermore, Feynman made accessible Dirac's quantum notation via his thought experiments on two-slit interference with electrons."

"Feynman is the young American professor, half genius and half buffoon, who keeps all physicists and their children amused with his effervescent vitality. He has, however, as I have recently learned, a great deal more to him than that, and you may be interested in his story. The part of it with which I am concerned began when he arrived at Los Alamos; there he found and fell in love with a brilliant and beautiful girl, who was tubercular and had been exiled to New Mexico in the hope of stopping the disease. When Feynman arrived, things had got so bad that the doctors gave her only a year to live, but he determined to marry her and marry her he did; and for a year and a half, while working at full pressure on the Project, he nursed her and made her days cheerful. She died just before the end of the war."

"A truer description would have said that Feynman was all genius and all buffoon. The deep thinking and the joyful clowning were not separate parts of a split personality. He did not do his thinking on Monday and his clowning on Tuesday. He was thinking and clowning simultaneously."

"Thirty-one years ago [1948], Dick Feynman told me about his "sum over histories" version of quantum mechanics. "The electron does anything it likes," he said. "It just goes in any direction at any speed, forward or backward in time, however it likes, and then you add up the amplitudes and it gives you the wave-function." I said to him, "You're crazy." But he wasn't."

"Why should we care about Feynman? What was so special about him? Why did he become a public icon, standing with Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking as the Holy Trinity of twentieth-century physics? The public has demonstrated remarkably good taste in choosing its icons. All three of them are genuinely great scientists, with flashes of true genius as well as solid accomplishments to their credit. But to become an icon, it is not enough to be a great scientist. There are many other scientists, not so great as Einstein but greater than Hawking and Feynman, who did not become icons. ... Scientists who become icons must not only be geniuses but also performers, playing to the crowd and enjoying public acclaim. Einstein and Feynman both grumbled about the newspaper and radio reporters who invaded their privacy, but both gave the reporters what the public wanted, sharp and witty remarks that would make good headlines. Hawking in his unique way also enjoys the public adulation that his triumph over physical obstacles has earned for him. I will never forget the joyful morning in Tokyo when Hawking went on a tour of the streets in his wheelchair and the Japanese crowds streamed after him, stretching out their hands to touch his chair. Einstein, Hawking, and Feynman shared an ability to break through the barriers that separated them from ordinary people. The public responded to them because they were regular guys, jokers as well as geniuses. The third quality that is needed for a scientist to become a public icon is wisdom. Besides being a famous joker and a famous genius, Feynman was also a wise human being whose answers to serious questions made sense. To me and to hundreds of other students who came to him for advice, he spoke truth. Like Einstein and Hawking, he had come through times of great suffering, nursing Arline through her illness and watching her die, and emerged stronger. Behind his enormous zest and enjoyment of life was an awareness of tragedy, a knowledge that our time on earth is short and precarious. The public made him into an icon because he was not only a great scientist and a great clown but also a great human being and a guide in time of trouble. Other Feynman books have portrayed him as a scientific wizard and as a storyteller. This collection of letters shows us for the first time the son caring for his father and mother, the father caring for his wife and children, the teacher caring for his students, the writer replying to people throughout the world who wrote to him about their problems and received his full and undivided attention."

"It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything."

"You are not your job. You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You're not your fucking khakis. You're the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world."

"Hi, you're gonna call off your rigorous investigation. You're gonna publicly state that there is no underground group, or, these guys are gonna take your balls. They're gonna send one to the New York Times, one to the LA Times, press release style. Look, the people you are after are the people you depend on: we cook your meals, we haul your trash, we connect your calls, we drive your ambulances, we guard you while you sleep. Do not fuck with us."

"Hitting bottom isn't a weekend retreat. It's not a goddamn seminar. Stop trying to control everything and just let go! LET GO!"

"The things you own end up owning you."

"You have to consider the possibility that God does not like you, never wanted you, in all probability he hates you. It's not the worst thing that could happen."

"Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken."

"If we are God's unwanted children, so be it!"

"First you've gotta know - not fear, know - that someday you're gonna die."

"I look like you wanna look, I fuck like you wanna fuck, I am smart, capable, and most importantly, I'm free in all the ways that you are not."

"We're consumers. We are the byproducts of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty, these things don't concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy's name on my underwear. Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra."

"You wanna make an omelet, you gotta break some eggs."

"Listen up, maggots! You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We are the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world."

"A condom is the glass slipper of our generation. You slip one on when you meet a stranger. You dance all night, and then you throw it away. The condom, I mean, not the stranger."

"My God ... I haven't been fucked like that since grade school."

"Candy-stripe a cancer ward. It's not my problem."

"I've got a stomach full of Xanax. I took what was left in the bottle. It might have been too much."

"[on the phone, after taking a bottle of sleeping pills] This isn't a real suicide-thing. This is probably one of those cry-for-help things... You're going to have to keep me up aaaall night."

"It's a bridesmaid's dress. I got it at a second-hand store. It was loved intensely for one night.. then cast aside."

"Norton plays Jack, a generic name for a generic guy. He's a mild-mannered corporate drone whose complacently consumerist lifestyle is turned inside out when he encounters one Tyler Durden. The punkishly anarchic Durden (Pitt) is everything Jack would like to be but isn't, his own walking, talking id. Like Terry Southern's Magic Christian, Durden expresses his repugnance of society's materialistic values in a series of actes gratuits of mischievous subversion. Moonlighting as a cinema projectionist, he splices single, subliminally registered frames from pornographic films into bland mainstream fare; moonlighting as a waiter in a swanky restaurant, he pees into the oxtail soup. Bare-knuckled and bare-chested, the two of them start pummelling one another for thrills, only gradually discovering that there's a whole world out there of emasculated American males just waiting for an opportunity to let the sweat, blood and sperm pent up within them ooze out from every pore. Well, why not? It's a promising idea for a film, especially a satirical comedy, which is what Fight Club unambiguously is for its first half-hour. Fincher is a vulgar, flashy film-maker (he directed Seven and The Game) who doesn't so much make films as take them, the way we refer to a photographer taking, rather than making, photographs: he's interested only in surfaces and he likes even grunge to glitter. (The French, as usual, coined the perfect expression for this style: le look.) He's a sharp scriptwriter, however, and Norton's omnipresent voice-off narration, coupled with the subject's sociological relevance (cf Susan Faludi's new book Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man), initially sucks one in."

"Fight Club starts out funny. The first 30 minutes are overwhelmingly perfect. Like the beginning of American Beauty, the opening sequence whirls you through time, taking you in and out of the narrator's (Norton's) yuppie disillusionment. Poor Edward Norton—his character isn't even given a name. For good reason, since his identity consists of what furniture to buy, what shoes match his suit, and which dinette set best fits his non-existent personality. In this yuppie's life, IKEA is synonymous with orgasm. Enter Tyler Durden. Brad Pitt takes on the challenging role of this American psycho—a soap salesman who lives as a squatter, steals a sportscar one day and ditches it the next, and takes random nightshift jobs to survive. Tyler wants "freedom" from yuppie existence and he makes it a point to obliterate any rules with which he comes in contact—he pees in customers' food, inserts frames of nudity into family films at random movie theaters, and, of course, starts a Fight Club with Norton. It happens in a matter of seconds. He asks Norton to hit him as hard as he can and—bam!--shirtless yuppies are pounding each other to bloody shreds in bar basements all over the city. The opening of Fight Club makes it clear that the movie's a satire. It's supposed to be a biting mockery of yuppie angst. The problem, unfortunately, is that Fincher completely underestimates Edward Norton as an actor. If Fight Club is to be a successful satire, the audience can't fall in love with Norton's narrator. We shouldn't see him as the righteous crusader, the man who can do no wrong. Because when we take every punch Norton takes, we lose our sense of detachment. We lose that ironic distance—the distance that makes a movie like American Beauty such a compelling psychological portrait. There's no seeing the forest from the trees here because of Norton's intensity and ability to elicit endless empathy. We're his unconditional ally. But after being pummeled by Fight Club into bloody submission, we're just begging for mercy and an ending that will leave our senses—not our intellect—intact. But there's one other glaring flaw. Unfortunately, it's an actor. Can you guess who it is? Oh yes, Brad Pitt should have been eternally jailed by the acting police after Seven Years in Tibet, Meet Joe Black, etc. etc. The guy has no range. He just yells when he's trying to be profound and adds a slight stutter when he's trying to be subtle. Pitt tries so damn hard not to be a pretty face, but he spends half the movie flexing his muscles and tearing off his shirt. And worst of all, he's self-conscious! Despite his posing, he's not a confident actor. Instead, he's annoying rather than intimidating; dumb rather than deep; an irritating yapper rather than the moral voice of the film. Perhaps if Pitt and Norton had switched parts, it might have worked. After all, we don't feel anything for Tyler Durden and we care far too much about Norton's narrator. But here's the only recourse. I hope David Fincher sits in a crowded movie theater a few times over the next couple weeks to watch audience reaction to his film. Maybe he'll realize that Fight Club isn't as "funny" as he thinks it is. Maybe he'll realize that biting satire often blurs into the irresponsible. Maybe he'll realize he took the "traumatized male" theme one step too far. Or maybe he's still mesmerized by the sheer brutality of it all—the glistening blood spattered on the wall. He's so enthralled by its color, its undeniable immediacy, that he can't see its indelible pattern. And even more dangerously, he can't tell whose blood it is."

""Fight Club" is the most frankly and cheerfully fascist big-star movie since "Death Wish," a celebration of violence in which the heroes write themselves a license to drink, smoke, screw and beat one another up. Sometimes, for variety, they beat up themselves. It's macho porn—the sex movie Hollywood has been moving toward for years, in which eroticism between the sexes is replaced by all-guy locker-room fights. Women, who have had a lifetime of practice at dealing with little-boy posturing, will instinctively see through it; men may get off on the testosterone rush. The fact that it is very well made and has a great first act certainly clouds the issue. Edward Norton stars as a depressed urban loner filled up to here with angst. He describes his world in dialogue of sardonic social satire. His life and job are driving him crazy. As a means of dealing with his pain, he seeks out 12-step meetings, where he can hug those less fortunate than himself and find catharsis in their suffering. It is not without irony that the first meeting he attends is for post-surgical victims of testicular cancer, since the whole movie is about guys afraid of losing their cojones. Only gradually are the final outlines of his master plan revealed. Is Tyler Durden in fact a leader of men with a useful philosophy? "It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything," he says, sounding like a man who tripped over the Nietzsche display on his way to the coffee bar in Borders. In my opinion, he has no useful truths. He's a bully—Werner Erhard plus S & M, a leather club operator without the decor. None of the Fight Club members grows stronger or freer because of their membership; they're reduced to pathetic cultists. Issue them black shirts and sign them up as skinheads. Whether Durden represents hidden aspects of the male psyche is a question the movie uses as a loophole—but is not able to escape through, because "Fight Club" is not about its ending but about its action. Of course, "Fight Club" itself does not advocate Durden's philosophy. It is a warning against it, I guess; one critic I like says it makes "a telling point about the bestial nature of man and what can happen when the numbing effects of day-to-day drudgery cause people to go a little crazy." I think it's the numbing effects of movies like this that cause people go to a little crazy. Although sophisticates will be able to rationalize the movie as an argument against the behavior it shows, my guess is that audience will like the behavior but not the argument. Certainly they'll buy tickets because they can see Pitt and Norton pounding on each other; a lot more people will leave this movie and get in fights than will leave it discussing Tyler Durden's moral philosophy. The images in movies like this argue for themselves, and it takes a lot of narration (or Narration) to argue against them."

"A stylized version of our IKEA present. It is talking about very simple concepts. We're designed to be hunters and we're in a society of shopping. There's nothing to kill anymore, there's nothing to fight, nothing to overcome, nothing to explore. In that societal emasculation this everyman is created. We wanted a title sequence that started in the fear center of the brain. [When you hear] the sound of a gun being cocked that's in your mouth, the part of you brain that gets everything going, that realizes that you are fucked - we see all the thought processes, we see the synapses firing, we see the chemical electrical impulses that are the call to arms. And we wanted to sort of follow that out. Because the movie is about thought, it's about how this guy thinks. And it's from his point of view, solely. So I liked the idea of starting a movie from thought, from the beginning of the first fear impulse that went, Oh shit, I'm fucked, how did I get here?"

"The movie is not that violent. There are ideas in the movie that are scary, but the film isn't about violence, the glorification of violence or the embracing of violence. In the movie, violence is a metaphor for feeling. It's a film about the problems or requirements involved with being masculine in today's society. I do like movies that take a toll on the audience. I want to work the subconscious. I want to involve you in ways in which you might not necessarily want to get involved. I want to play off those things that you're expecting to get when the lights go down and the 20th Century Fox logo comes up. There's an audience expectation and I'm interested in how movies play with—and off—that expectation. That's what I'm interested in."

""Fight Club" appears threatening to some because it seems to challenge the safety of the modern world. But while Edward Norton and Brad Pitt seem only to offer unprovoked violence and mayhem, there are some salient points on offer behind it all. Namely, it is the examination of a man who has allowed himself to become sucked into the minutiae of his corporate job. He further exacerbates his spiral of paranoia by turning to other corporate gimmicks for solutions, and treating them like a religion. He is Edward Norton and Fight Club is his desperate reaction."

"Edward Norton: The reason Fight Club penetrated to a lot of people our age was that it grappled with that idea that there's this person that I am who's forced to move around in this neutered, contemporary world, but people don't know what I've got inside me. That sensation—not just in young men, but in people in general—or that idea of how to get your authentic self out there in the contemporary world. I think the reason that lodged with a lot of people was that people really do understand that sense that there's a schism inside them that they're aware of, that doesn't get expression. I feel that way. I think a lot of people our age feel that way. They feel more complex than the world allows them to be."

"Guaranteed: Fight Club will blow your skirt up. It's not just the rush of seeing Edward Norton, Brad Pitt and director David Fincher hit career peaks in a groundbreaking film. And it's not the sick kick of watching Gen X amateurs bare-knuckling each other in seedy basements; that'd get old fast. The film's bold, bruising humor leaves marks on a wide range of hot-button issues: It's about being young, male and powerless against the pacifying drug of consumerism. It's about solitude, despair and bottled-up rage. It's about how not to feel dead as Y2K approaches. It's about daring to imagine the disenfranchised reducing the world to rubble and starting over. For daring to imagine, Fight Club will take a few hits. Fincher's film of Chuck Palahniuk's 1996 novel – with a high-voltage script by newcomer Jim Uhls – is already being misinterpreted as an “apology for fascism.” One critic wondered whether Rupert Murdoch's Fox 2000, the company releasing Fight Club, “knew what it was doing” in spending $70 million on a movie that is “not only anti-capitalism but anti-society and, indeed, anti-God.” My take is that Fight Club is pro-thinking, no matter what deities are offended. Is that threatening? You bet. Norton catches lightning in a revelatory performance that keeps delivering miracles of character nuance. He may be the best actor of his generation. Watching Jack beat himself bloody in front of his boss is a high-wire act that belongs in a time capsule. And Pitt, in his riskiest role to date, uses his sexual swagger to subversive comic effect; he's freer, funnier and freakier than you've ever seen him. It's Tyler who shows Jack how to add nitric acid to soap and make nitro-glycerin. It's Tyler who turns fight clubs into militias and then bomb squads ready to blast the foundations of the planet's power base: banks and credit-card companies."

"We had some great choreographers on the fight scene once we got into the club itself," says Pitt, who plays Tyler Durden, a self-styled male-consciousness raiser. Newsweek's David Anson reviews Pitt's character as "a kind of Nietzschean Robin Hood, using violence to restore dignity to the benighted American male. "If Rudy Giuliani was upset by a little bit of elephant dung on a portrait of the Virgin Mary," writes critic Jason Kaufman for NY Rock, referring to the New York mayor's recent displeasure with the Brooklyn Museum of Art's "Sensation" exhibit, "'Fight Club' should give him a coronary on the spot." Anson, in his Newsweek review, says the film trades in homoerotic imagery without addressing it: "When the movie, after satirizing the gym-enhanced bodies of men in Gucci subway ads ("Self-improvement is masturbation," Tyler pronounces), cuts to the impeccably lean and cut body of its leading man, it is in the grips of a style-content contradiction that this slick denunciation of surface values battles throughout."

"How much can you know about yourself, if you've never been in a fight?"