"The Quantum Universe has a quotation from me in every chapter - but it's a damn good book anyway."
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Book quotes (page 115 of 1049)
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"Everybody who reasons carefully about anything is making a contribution ... and if you abstract it away and send it to the Department of Mathematics they put it in books."
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"The more closely the author thinks of why he wrote, the more he comes to regard his imagination as a kind of self-generating cement which glued his facts together, and his emotions as a kind of dark and obscure designer of those facts. Reluctantly, he comes to the conclusion that to account for his book is to account for his life."
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"It would have been impossible for me to have told anyone what I derived from these novels, for it was nothing less than a sense of life itself."
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"Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation; it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function, produced by a certain arrest of sexual development. Many highly respectable individuals of ancient and modern times have been homosexuals, several of the greatest men among them (Plato, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, etc.). It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime--and a cruelty, too. If you do not believe me, read the books of Havelock Ellis."
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"If you don't like my book, write your own. If you don't think you can write a novel, that ought to tell you something. If you think you can, do. No excuses. If you still don't like my novel, find a book you do like. Life is too short to be miserable. If you do like my novels, I commend your good taste."
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"If you're going to undertake any project, like a book, you have to show up to give."
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"Every time I start on a new book, I am a beginner again. I doubt myself, I grow discouraged, all the work accomplished in the past is as though it never was, my first drafts are so shapeless that it seems impossible to go on with the attempt at all, right up until the moment - always imperceptible, there, too, there is a break - when it is has become impossible not to finish it."
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"I think that The Second Sex will seem an old, dated book, after a while. But nonetheless, a book which will have made its contribution. At least, I hope so."
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"Few books are more thrilling than certain confessions, but they must be honest, and the author must have something to confess."
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"And I have written three books on the soul, Proving absurd all written hitherto, And putting us to ignorance again."
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"You have to have talent to some extent - I certainly hope I have talent - but you have to have luck as well. Once you get that first shot, that will get you noticed for the rest of your books and that will give the rest of your books a better chance."
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"I was inspired to write children's books, but without blood and gore."
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"I'm pretty grounded on my own passion - writing books, you know, doing programs, speaking around the country. And I love what I do."
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"In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves."
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"We were to found a University magazine. A pair of little, active brothers-Livingstone by name, great skippers on the foot, great rubbers of the hands, who kept a book-shop over against the University building-had been debauched to play the part of publishers. We four were to be conjuct editors and, what was the main point of the concern, to print our own works; while, by every rule of arithmetic-that flatterer of credulity-the adventure must succeed and bring great profit. Well, well: it was a bright vision."
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"I believe that the habit of constant reading of good books and scholarly periodicals and magazines in many disciplines is vital to give a larger perspective and to constantly sense the interdependent nature of life."
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"Someone told me that each equation I included in my book would halve the sales. I did put in one equation, Einstein's famous equation, E = MC squared. I hope that this will not scare off half of my potential readers."
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"I want my books sold on airport bookstalls."
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"In his anti-Darwinian book... (and eponymously named The Neck of the Giraffe ), Francis Hitching tells the story... "The need to survive by reaching ever higher for food is, like so many Darwinian explanations of its kind, little more than a post hoc speculation." Hitching is quite correct, but he rebuts a fairy story that Darwin was far too smart to tell - even though the tale later entered our high school texts as a "classic case" nonetheless."
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