Quotes from David Leavitt

Era la padronanza di sé che pietrificava e allarmava Pablo più di tutto, perché veniva dalla giovinezza e dalla bellezza, come quella che un tempo aveva conosciuto anche lui, e proprio per questo sapeva che non avrebbe conosciuto mai più.

You could reach for him, and sometimes you would grab hold of him. But sometimes all you would grab hold of was a reflection of a reflection in a revolving door.

They were good parents. The worst thing they ever did to us was die.

Así que huyes de los causantes de dolor, vas a un sitio nuevo, intentas convencerte de que el viejo sitio no existe, que la distancia borra la historia».

self-preservation has one virtue, which is that it doesn't pretend to be anything other than what it is. With altruism, there's almost always a hidden motive. The benefactor wants to be lionized or, worse, have the person he's helping at his mercy. Otherwise why would people who give money to universities want buildings named after them?

This isn't the end of the story. Maybe it's the end of a part of the story, but not the whole of it.

For those who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like.

Decidability is impossible. We are back in the land of paradox, with Epimenides declaring that he is a liar and Bertrand Russell upsetting Frege's applecart

The thing you've got to understand about Eva and me is that we have a system. She does the wanting, I do the paying. That's how it's always been with us, and if I'm to be honest, until now it's suited me as well as it has her. Maybe better, since it's spared me the burden of having to want things for myself.

If the strength of our feelings was in proportion to the events that provoke them, the world would not be the place it is

Self-sufficiency is the core principle of conservatism. At least my conservatism." "Survival of the fittest? And yet your people want creationism taught in the schools.

It's what I fear, which for me is as good as knowing.

If a man says 'I am lying' we say that it follows that he is not lying, from which it follows that he is lying and so on. Well, so what? You can go on like that until you were black in the face. Why not? It doesn't matter." For Turing, it did matter—not in some abstract or ideal sense but because he believed that hidden contradictions could result in things "going wrong.

The astonishing saga of the code breakers is really an example of the power of mathematics. Hardy's "clean and gentle" science, as it turned out, was stronger than the entire German war machine, which, for all its posturing, ended up being trumped by a group of geeky mathematicians and engineers working out their ideas on paper and fitting electrical switches inside ugly-looking machines.

De pronto comprendió que todos aquellos meses en que se había mostrado tan «activa» eran tan sólo una mentira. Había que mentir para poder vivir aquella muerte lenta, o si no, uno se moría durante todo lo que le quedaba de vida.

It's one thing to refuse an invitation," Aaron said, "another to be told you'll never get one.

Turing's years at Bletchley constitute the best-documented period in his life, yet in the end his work as a code breaker amounted to a very long diversion from his dream of building a universal machine. For the bombes were about as far from universal as you could get. Their very design guaranteed their obsolescence, since it depended on the quirks and particularities of another, much smaller machine, the Enigma, of which the bombe was the huge, distorted shadow.

It seems not improbable that when Turing let slip the fact of his homosexuality "accidentally," especially to a young man like Bayley, he was hoping against hope that the admission might provoke an expression of reciprocal desire. That rarely happened. Later he told Robin Gandy, "Sometimes you're sitting talking to someone and you know that in three quarters of an hour you will either be having a marvellous night or you will be kicked out of the room.

The sickness that's the price you pay for cure

Lo que más me aterra en este mundo —le dice Neil a Wayne— es la posibilidad de que le destroces la vida a alguien sin tú saberlo. O incluso de que le cambies la vida. Detesto pensar que uno puede tener ese poder, yo sería una madre deplorable.

You're lucky. You've got money—enough money to rescue, and to choose who you rescue—and you want the satisfaction of exercising that power. And yet there's another side to it. There's my admitting, my having to admit, that if I'd led a better, more orderly life, I wouldn't be in this position

Nell'era di Reagan, ha dichiarato Mrs. Campbell, abbracciare la causa della pace e della giustizia è un'impresa futile, stancante e niente affatto remunerativa; pertanto si presta a essere abbracciata soltanto dalle madri.

Can a machine, educated through a system of reward and punishment, be said to be able to think? Are children, when they cry or laugh, revealing some spark of soul that distinguishes them from machines, or simply following "rules of behavior" with which we as spectators empathize because we are familiar with them? Or to put it another way, does asking whether computers think require us to ask, as well, whether humans compute?

Nor should it be assumed that machines are not capable of deception. On the contrary, the criticism "that a machine cannot have much diversity of behaviour is just a way of saying that it cannot have much storage capacity.