Nobel Prize autobiography (1998)
Context: Real understanding of a thing comes from taking it apart oneself, not reading about it in a book or hearing about it in a classroom. To this day I always insist on working out a problem from the beginning without reading up on it first, a habit that sometimes gets me into trouble but just as often helps me see things my predecessors have missed.
Source: The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna (1942), p. 863
“I have written a book with Jacob Laksin about universities called One Party Classroom.”
Among other things, the title highlights the fact that so-called liberals have purged American faculties of conservative voices. It has been the most successful witch-hunt in American history.
[David, Horowitz, http://townhall.com/columnists/davidhorowitz/2009/05/04/the_threat_at_home, "The Threat at Home", townhall.com, July 31, 2006, 2014-21-06]
2009
“That was one thing about books: once you read them they couldn’t be unread.”
Source: The Magician's Land
“From the age of about eight or nine I read just about every comic book available in England.”
The Paris Review interview
Context: From the age of about eight or nine I read just about every comic book available in England. At that time my parents owned a newsagent’s shop. I took the comics from the shop, read them, and put them back. That went on until I was twelve or thirteen. Then my mother brought in a sort of children’s encyclopedia that included sections of folklore. Little folktales. I remember the shock of reading those stories. I could not believe that such wonderful things existed. … throughout your life you have certain literary shocks, and the folktales were my first. From then on I began to collect folklore, folk stories, and mythology. That became my craze.
“It had come about exactly in the way things happened in books.”
Source: And Then There Were None
