Quotes About Author

One idea to a sentence is still the best advice that anyone has ever given on writing.

In office buildings and retail premises in which entry is through double doors and one of those doors is locked for no reason, the door must bear a large sign saying: "This Door Is Locked for No Reason.

Four times I was honked at for having the temerity to proceed through town without the benefit of metal.

Describing his experience with the sting of an extremely toxic jellyfish, he did something you don't often see a scientist do: he shivered.

I had a hangover you could sell to science

The best that can be said for Norwegian television is that it gives you the sensation of a coma without the worry and inconvenience.

Thoreau was an idiot.

Robert G. Elliott was not a murderous person by nature, but he proved, no doubt to his own surprise, to be rather good at killing people.

Among the tiny atomic structures the plankton take to the grave with them are two very stable isotopes—oxygen-16 and oxygen-18.

Carlyle had no option but to sit down and recompose the book as best he could—a task made all the more challenging by the fact that he no longer had notes to call on, for it had been his bizarre and patently misguided practice to burn his notes as he finished each chapter, as a kind of celebration of work done.

Instead, we were given the period of unusual tranquillity known as the Holocene, the time in which we live now.

untimely death is a common but really quite inane expression. When ever was a death timely?

There are two problems with notions of panspermia, as extraterrestrial theories are known.

Jefferson, incidentally, was also a great adventurer with foods. Among his many other accomplishments, he was the first person in America to slice potatoes lengthwise and fry them. So as well as being the author of the Declaration of Independence, he was also the father of the American French fry.

cosmological constant to his theory, at the Lowell Observatory in

The disputes are entertainingly surveyed in Charles Elliott's The Potting-Shed Papers.

Excited, I took the book home that night and opened it before dinner – an action that I expect prompted my

Consider the oft-quoted statement "the exception proves the rule." Most people take this to mean that the exception confirms the rule, though when you ask them to explain the logic in that statement, they usually cannot. After all, how can an exception prove a rule? It can't. The answer is that an earlier meaning of prove was to test (a meaning preserved in proving ground) and with that meaning the statement suddenly becomes sensible—the exception tests the rule.

I now know that there is a happy abundance of science writers who pen the most lucid and thrilling prose—Timothy Ferris, Richard Fortey, and Tim Flannery

Sabine Baring-Gould wrote the hymn "Onward, Christian Soldiers" and, more unexpectedly, the first novel to feature a werewolf.

If you are going to have a system of hereditary privilege, then surely you have to take what comes your way no matter how ponderous the poor fellow may be or how curious his taste in mistresses.

activity. Often a sign of prolixity, as here: 'The warnings followed a week of earthquake activity throughout the region' (Independent). Just make it 'a week of earthquakes'.

The belief that and should not be used to begin a sentence is without foundation. And that's all there is to it.

interesting? And here's another interesting fact, which I didn't tell you about earlier because I've been saving it: Wyatt Earp was from Pella, the little Iowa town with the windmills. Isn't that great?