Quotes About Invention

Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it.

Where do you get inspiration for your books? I tell myself I can't have another cup of coffee till I thought of an idea.

I am fascinated by religion. (That's a completely different thing from believing in it!) It has had such an incalculably huge effect on human affairs. What is it? What does it represent? Why have we invented it? How does it keep going? What will become of it? I love to keep poking and prodding at it. I've thought about it so much over the years that that fascination is bound to spill over into my writing.

The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife. Trin Tragula – for that was his name – was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.

What did "psychosassic" mean? It was his own word and he vigorously denied that it meant anything at all.

The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife. Trin

The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife.

The idea for the title first cropped up while I was lying drunk in a field in Innsbruck, Austria, in 1971. Not particularly drunk, just the sort of drunk you get when you have a couple of stiff Gössers after not having eaten for two days straight, on account of being a penniless hitchhiker. We are talking of a mild inability to stand up.

The Jatravartids, who live in perpetual fear of the time they call The Coming of the Great White Handkerchief, are small blue creatures with more than fifty arms each, who are therefore unique in being the only race in history to have invented the aerosol deodorant before the wheel.

Neal fished around in a bag, removed something and handed it to me. It was a forky thing, but with a round depression. "What the fuck is this?" "It's a spork.

I've always been interested in the unintended side effects of technology. For instance, when the car was invented, who would have thought dogs would like sticking their heads out the window to enjoy the scentscape generated by speed and wind?

an Enigma machine, a set of gears of Charles Babbage's Difference Engine, a

drug is going to end warfare as we know it." "That's what Alfred Nobel said when he invented dynamite.

Perish the men who said our good things before us!

I don't think necessity is the mother of invention - invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness. To save oneself trouble.

I don't think necessity is the mother of invention — invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness. To save oneself trouble.

I don't think necessity is the mother of invention. Invention . . . arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness. To save oneself trouble.

How true is the saying that man was forced to invent work in order to escape the strain of having to think.

Because, you see, if the man were an invention—a fabrication—how much easier to make him disappear!

Les femmes," generalized Poirot. "They are marvellous! They invent haphazard—and by miracle they are right. Not that it is that, really. Women observe subconsciously a thousand little details, without knowing that they are doing so. Their subconscious mind adds these little things together—and they call the result intuition.

It is a theory of mine," I said, warming to my theme, "that we owe most of our great inventions and most of the achievements of genius to idleness?either enforced or voluntary. The human mind prefers to be spoon-fed with the thoughts of others, but deprived of such nourishment it will, reluctantly, begin to think for itself?and such thinking, remember, is original thinking and may have valuable results.

Speech, so a wise old Frenchman said to me once, is an invention of man's to prevent him from thinking. It is also an infallible means of discovering that which he wishes to hide.

Speech, so a wise old Frenchman said to me once, is an invention of man's to prevent him from thinking.

Speech, so a wise old Frenchman said to me once, is an invention of man's to prevent him from thinking. It is also an infallible means of discovering that which he wishes to hide. A human being, Hastings, cannot resist the opportunity to reveal himself and express his personality which conversation gives him. Every time he will give himself away.