Quotes About Author

Creativity is not [where you create] some new thing that's emerged from your brain," Nathan told me. "It's a new association between two things that were already there.

The one exception, intriguingly, was Wikipedia, where the level of attention on topics has held steady.)

Irving didn't want this to be true—it contradicted his own published work—but he told me, "One thing I do pride myself on is looking at the data, and allowing my mind to be changed when the data's different than I expected.

When we hear about "drug-related violence," we picture somebody getting high and killing people. We think the violence is the product of the drugs. But in fact, it turns out this is only a tiny sliver of the violence. The vast majority is like Chino's violence—to establish, protect, and defend drug territory in an illegal market, and to build a name for being consistently terrifying so nobody tries to take your property or turf. Professor

Mexico is not deciding this policy . . . This war, this criminalization strategy, is imposed by the U.S. government.

Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize–winning economist who was the pope of the neoliberal right, and a leading critic of the drug war.

Anarchists are socialists because they want the improvement of society, and they are communists because they are convinced that such a transformation of society can only result from the establishment of a commonwealth of property.

Music is an agreeable harmony for the honor of God and the permissible delights of the soul.

The Church is blessed with a good stomach, has gobbled down whole countries even, yet never suffered from repletion; only the Church is able to digest treasures of wickedness, dear ladies.

Who ne'er his bread in sorrow ate,Who ne'er the mournful midnight hoursWeeping upon his bed has sate,He knows you not, ye Heavenly Powers.

The spirits that I summoned upI now can't rid myself of.

We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.

If any man wish to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts; and if any would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul.

A creation of importance can only be produced when its author isolates himself; it is a child of solitude.

He is a prophet and not a poet and therefore his Koran is to be seen as a divine law and not as a book of a human being, made for education or entertainment.

He [Muhammed] is a prophet and not a poet and therefore his Koran is to be seen as a divine law and not as a book of a human being, made for education or entertainment.

I find by this, how much an author injures his works by altering them, even though they be improved in a poetical point of view. The first impression is readily received. We are so constituted that we believe the most incredible things; and, once they are engraved upon the memory, woe to him who would endeavour to efface them.

Did I not feel charmed at those truly genuine expressions of nature, which, though but little mirthful in reality, so often amused us?

It seems to me that good novels celebrate the mystery in ordinary life, and summing it all up in psychological terms strips the mystery away

I have very strongly this feeling that our everyday life is at one and the same time banal, overfamiliar, platitudinous and yet mysterious and extraordinary.

One life is worth the universe. Poe was able to go right into the very depth of life and to demonstrate this.

The scourge of life, and death's extreme disgrace, The smoke of hell,--that monster called Paine.

The Stanford prison experiment came out of class exercises in which I encouraged students to understand the dynamics of prison life.

This is the generation whose first cry of life was the Hungarian uprising.