I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you w...
He could not put down a word without suspecting that it might be the wrong one and that if he held back for another day the intermediate experience would provide the right one. There was no end to tha...
Real data is messy. ...It's all very noisy out there. Very hard to spot the tune. Like a piano in the next room, it's playing your song, but unfortunately it's out of whack, some of the strings are mi...
You are an over-excited little man, with a need for self-expression far beyond the scope of your natural gifts. This is not discreditable. Neither does it make you an artist.
We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the word for it. Before we know that there are words. Out we come, bloodied and squalling, with the knowledge that for all the points of...
We drift down time, clutching at straws. But what good's a brick to a drowning man?
Thomasina: Septimus, what is carnal embrace?Septimus: Carnal embrace is the practice of throwing one's arms around a side of beef.
The whole of life is like that now. It’s even impossible to think naturally because opinion has been set out for you to read back. Originality has been used up. And yet faith in one’s uniqueness dies...
The universe is deterministic all right, just like Newton said, I mean it's trying to be, but the only thing going wrong is people fancying people who aren't supposed to be in that part of the plan.
The truth is, we value your company, for want of any other. We have been left so much to our own devices—after a while one welcomes the uncertainty of being left to other people's.
Rosencrantz: I don't believe in it anyway.Guildenstern: What?Rosencrantz: England.Guildenstern: Just a conspiracy of cartographers, then?
Poetical feelings are a peril to scholarship. There are always poetical people ready to protest that a corrupt line is exquisite. Exquisite to whom? The Romans were foreigners writing for foreigners t...
Life is a gamble, at terrible odds. If it were a bet you wouldn’t take it.
It's the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.
It's all trivial-your grouse, my hermit, Bernard's Byron. Comparing what we're looking for misses the point. It's wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we're going out the way we came in. Th...
Guildenstern: What's the first thing you remember? Rosencrantz: [thinks] No, it's no good. It was a long time ago. Guildenstern: No, you don't take my meaning. What's the first thing you remember afte...
Being a person is respect, because you're not a cat or a dog or a bunch of tulips, you're a human person and humanness isn't like something there can be different amounts of, it's maxed out from the s...
If I had been asked to write 1,200 words for a newspaper tomorrow, on any subject, I would just do it rather than leave a white hole in the page. And I think it's a very healthy attitude to take to wr...
Everything has to be taken on trust truth is only that which is taken to be true. It's the currency of living. There may be nothing behind it but it doesn't make any difference so long as it is hono...
From principles is derived probability, but truth or certainty is obtained only from facts.