Quotes About Author

His research led him to one overwhelming conclusion, published in a seminal paper in 1975: big cities nurture subcultures much more effectively than suburbs or small towns.

It was a silly time to try to make a living out of words, but it was a silly time in general.

I don't know Stallman well. I know him well enough to know he is a hard man to like." (And that was in the preface of Stallman's own book!)

and a tendency to take offense at an inefficient, suboptimal way of doing things.

stuff is wonderful, but having nothing to do can be wonderful, too."??

Ennui had more distractions far more amusing than the automatons of a watchmaker in Mühlenberg.

When I first opened this book and saw all those scholarly footnotes, my heart leapt up as though I saw a host of golden daffodils.

I envy Christ, he had a disease named after him

Marcus de Obregón is appealing and, yes, instructive, but is not entirely successful because the author often forgot he was writing a novel, not his memoirs.

Aretino was a satirist on the noble if futile quest to reform his corrupt society by shoving its face in its worse excesses. (Futile because has any society ever reformed itself after being shown the error of its ways by a satirist? anywhere? ever?)

Sorel's novels deserve to be revived, but Polexander can be left in its watery grave.

So we'll leave him [Plato] to the philosophers and not try to make a novelist of him against his will; he excluded innovative artists from his ideal republic, so we'll exclude him from our republic of fiction.

Hitler (right) welcomed Mussolini to Germany in June 1940.

Yes, indeed, Senator Pinarius. It's because the author mentions his dealings with the late Marcus, blessed be his memory, and with Commodus, blessed be his reign. Anything to do with the imperial family is always guaranteed to sell, and with today's awful news, people are hungry to read anything to do with the beloved Marcus.

What appalling tales we shall have to tell of the strange lands we visited; and of those lands, surely none was stranger or more barbaric than Rome!

That is, the psychological effects of the next pandemic will likely be more pronounced, more widespread, and longer-lasting than the purely somatic effects of infection.

the psychological effects of the next pandemic will likely be more pronounced, more widespread, and longer-lasting than the purely somatic effects of infection

Physicists are more opportunistic, demanding only enough precision and certainty to give them a good chance of avoiding serious mistakes. In the preface of my own treatise on the quantum theory of fields, I admit that "there are parts of this book that will bring tears to the eyes of the mathematically inclined reader.

I was arrested for selling illegal-size paper.

I'm writing a book. I've got the page numbers done.

Imagine Pulitzer prizefighting.

Oh Lion in a peculiar guise, Sharp Roman road to Paradise, Come eat me up, I'll pay thy toll With all my flesh, and keep my soul.

Love is not love that wounded bleeds And bleeding sullies slow. Come death within my hands and I Unto my love will go.

The guinea pig took another sip of his beer and rolled his eyes in exasperation - was this never going to end? 'He works better when he's drunk,' Señor Villanova explained.