Quotes About Discovery

When I was thirteen years old, I didn't exactly discover epic fantasy on my own. I acquired it as a social defence mechanism.

When I heard Elvis and his 'Sun Sessions,' I went mad for it. I was about thirteen.

I have been a nomad for most of my thirties, even creatively.

For some reason, I spent my early thirties reading as much postwar Hungarian fiction as I could get my hands on.

I spent my thirties living out of boxes and moving every six months to a year. It was my cloud period: I just wandered like a cloud for ten years, following the food supply. I was a hunter, gatherer, an academic migrant.

And then writing, it was like I just found it, you know? Like you just found your favorite flavor of ice cream, all of a sudden there it is. 'This is what I should have been doing for the last thirty years. What was I thinking?' So I was, then I was in and then I had to just keep going with it.

As a professional journalist, I've been interviewing people for almost thirty years. And the one thing I've learned from all those interviews is that I am always going to be surprised.

Between the time I was 16 until I was about 20, the books I read were by people like Thomas Mann, James Baldwin, Thom Gunn, Elizabeth Bishop. All gay, of course, although I swear I didn't know that at the time. Yet all of them, it turned out, had had a parent who died during their childhood. Sexuality is nothing compared to that.

My physics teacher, Thomas Miner was particularly gifted. To this day, I remember how he introduced the subject of physics. He told us we were going to learn how to deal with very simple questions such as how a body falls due to the acceleration of gravity.

Now that my kids are out of the house, I'm finally able to get to the classics I never read: Emily Bronte, Dylan Thomas, Joseph Heller's 'Catch-22.' It's endless. They're all in this gigantic pile next to my bed.

By the time I was 10 or 12, I had discovered the lure of the romance genre - and the dusty copy of 'The Thorn Birds' on my parents' bookshelf.

It is more likely that more than a century will pass before we know the structure of the chemical atoms as thoroughly as we do our solar system.

What I found was that I thoroughly enjoyed the plumbing of experiment.

As a theoretician, I am proud to be part of a counter revolution... discovering that quantum field theory language was not dead and finished but had not really been explored thoroughly enough.

Everyone that I've talked to who's been to space has thoroughly enjoyed the experience, and what you often hear them say is: It was great, but we just had to come home.

Religion wasn't imposed on me. I dabbled with faith, and I explored religion quite thoroughly.

This land may be profitable to those that will adventure it.

The most remarkable discovery in all of astronomy is that the stars are made of atoms of the same kind as those on the earth.

We seek him here, we seek him there, Those Frenchies seek him everywhere. Is he in heaven? - Is he in hell? That damned, elusive Pimpernel?

I always liked those moments of epiphany, when you have the next destination.

Every great inspiration is but an experiment - though every experiment we know, is not a great inspiration.

The world's a forest, in which all lose their way; though by a different path each goes astray.

I do remember, though, when I discovered the third! I was about five years old - it was a very pleasing sound. I remembered that if I hit one note, then skipped one and played the next, I could get this really good sound.

Discovery is seeing what everybody else has seen, and thinking what nobody else has thought.