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.
“It had come about exactly in the way things happened in books.”
Source: And Then There Were None
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Agatha Christie 320
English mystery and detective writer 1890–1976Related quotes
“The odd thing about people who had many books was how they always wanted more.”
Source: The Bell at Sealey Head
Interview in "Secrets of the Old One" in Berkeley Groks (16 March 2005) http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/%7Efrank/BerkeleyGroks_Penrose.htm.
Context: Some years ago, I wrote a book called The Emperor's New Mind and that book was describing a point of view I had about consciousness and why it was not something that comes about from complicated calculations. So we are not exactly computers. There's something else going on and the question of what this something else was would depend on some detailed physics and so I needed chapters in that book, which describes the physics as it is understood today. Well anyway, this book was written and various people commented to me and they said perhaps I could use this book for a course Physics for Poets or whatever it is if it didn't have all that contentious stuff about the mind in that. So I thought, well, that doesn't sound too hard, all I'll do is get out the scissor out and snip out all the bits, which have something to do with the mind. The trouble is that if I did that — and I actually didn't do it — the whole book fell to pieces really because the whole driving force behind the book was this quest to find out what could it be that constitutes consciousness in the physical world as we know it or as we hope to know it in future
Abortion: The Clash of Absolutes (1990), Approaching Abortion Anew
Source: Seabiscuit: An American Legend
"Pirx's Tale" in More Tales of Pirx The Pilot (1983)
Context: Oh, I read good books, too, but only Earthside. Why that is, I don't really know. Never stopped to analyze it. Good books tell the truth, even when they're about things that never have been and never will be. They're truthful in a different way. When they talk about outer space, they make you feel the silence, so unlike the Earthly kind — and the lifelessness. Whatever the adventures, the message is always the same: humans will never feel at home out there.
Source: Eating People is Wrong (1959), Ch. 8