“I am such a slow learner that once I understand something I might as well write it down!”

"The State of the Theatre" an interview by Henry Brandon in Harpers 221 (November 1960)
Context: I cannot write anything that I understand too well. If I know what something means to me, if I have already come to the end of it as an experience, I can't write it because it seems a twice-told tale. I have to astonish myself, and that of course is a very costly way of going about things, because you can go up a dead end and discover that it's beyond your capacity to discover some organism underneath your feeling, and you're left simply with a formless feeling which is not itself art. It's inexpressible and one must leave it until it is hardened and becomes something that has form and has some possibility of being communicated. It might take a year or two or three or four to emerge.

Letter (3 July 1956); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

February, 1932
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)

Source: The Fires of Heaven

.NET Briefing Day Speech (24 July 2002) http://www.microsoft.com/billgates/speeches/2002/07-24netstrategy.asp <br class="br">2000s

Source: On challenging stereotypes in “Researcher Nadia Barhoum interviews Rabih Alameddine” https://belonging.berkeley.edu/alameddine (Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley)

Source: Summer Knight

On the secondary nature of historical research in his writing process in “UWEM AKPAN | INTERVIEW” https://granta.com/interview-uwem-akpan/ in Granta (2008 Nov 14)