Great Throughts Treasury

"Franz Kafka is an idea person. His books begin and end in ideas. Ideas have always been important to me in my writing. To the point that I have to be careful that they don't take over."

"He had a problem, like any other problem. The problem just hadn't been well posed. The problem was: Should he leave Penny or not?"

"I am spellbound by the plays of Shakespeare. And I am spellbound by the second law of thermodynamics. The great ideas in science, like the Cro-Magnon paintings and the plays of Shakespeare, are part of our cultural heritage."

"He feels himself falling. He wants to spend every minute with her, he wants to possess her, her purity, her body, her mind. She is what he has been waiting for. Now he can live."

"I have a family and you know very well the time that that takes. That's good time. I have a couple hobbies. I'm a runner and play tennis. In the summer my family and I uproot ourselves and go live in Maine for the summer. We have a house on a very tiny island in Maine. Which is really my spiritual center. We've been going there for ten years, and it has no ferry service, no bridges, no telephone service. It's really isolated."

"I believe in survival of the fittest of the ideas: if an idea has survived for a few years within the jungle of my mind, then I feel like it's worth pursuing and writing a book."

"Human beings consider themselves satisfied only compared to some other condition. A man who has owned nothing but a bicycle all of his life feels suddenly wealthy the moment he buys an automobile ... but this happy sensation wears off. After a while the car becomes just another thing that he owns. Moreover, when his neighbor next door buys two cars, in an instant our man feels wretchedly poor and deprived."

"His dreams have taken hold of his research. His dreams have worn him out, exhausted him so that he sometimes cannot tell whether he is awake or asleep."

"I consider myself a spiritual atheist. I certainly believe there are forces bigger than ourselves, and that we should be searching, individually, for meaning in our lives. But I don't believe there's a supreme being, an intelligence that created everything."

"I consider myself an essayist and a fiction writer. In the essays, I certainly have been influenced by some of the leading science essayists. Like Loren Eiseley, Stephen Jay Gould, Lewis Thomas."

"I do not think we will ever have a complete theory of nature. The history of science has been a continuing progress of deeper and deeper understanding, of theories with greater and greater accuracy and predictive power. I see no reason why this progression will come to an end. But even if it did come to an end, in the sense that we had one master equation that contained all the fundamental principles of nature, there would still be a great deal for science to do. The working out of that equation and application of it to all the zillions of different physical situations of matter and energy on earth would occupy scientists for eons. That ultimate master equation would be like knowing the rules of chess. Once you know how the bishop moves and the pawn moves and the queen moves, you have not conquered the game. There are still zillions of different possible configurations on the chessboard, and lots of different strategies that need to be analyzed and explored -- requiring renewed creativity. So, I see scientists in business for a long time, at least for the next 5 billion years until our sun burns out."

"I don?t know why we long so for permanence, why the fleeting nature of things so disturbs. With futility, we cling to the old wallet long after it has fallen apart. We visit and revisit the old neighborhood where we grew up, searching for the remembered grove of trees and the little fence. We clutch our old photographs. In our churches and synagogues and mosques, we pray to the everlasting and eternal. Yet, in every nook and cranny, nature screams at the top of her lungs that nothing lasts, that it is all passing away. All that we see around us, including our own bodies, is shifting and evaporating and one day will be gone. Where are the one billion people who lived and breathed in the year 1800, only two short centuries ago?"

"I don't automatically start on a new book as soon as I've finished the previous one. There are some writers who can ? they're like chain-smokers, and I'm not a chain-smoker. I want an idea to simmer and stew for a long period of time."

"I go live in Maine for the summer. Without computer, and without the telephone service we are mercifully without the faxes and e-mails. So it's really about two and a half months that I'll feel like I can recover some silence in my life...which is so hard to find."

"I have for a long time loved fabulist, imaginative fiction, such as the writing of Italo Calvino, Jose Saramago, Michael Bulgakov, and Salman Rushdie. I also like the magic realist writers, such as Borges and Marquez, and feel that interesting truths can be learned about our world by exploring highly distorted worlds."

"I have always loved magic realism as a form of writing. I have also been fascinated for a long time with the intersection of science and religion."

"I love the fact publishers are still publishing unprofitable material. It's a challenge to the powers that be. It's saying there is a real literature in this country and we will keep publishing it."

"I have a number of vague ideas where I just have the core or kernel of the idea. I feel like I need some time for my mind to fill up again. I feel empty. Right now."

"I have too many friends who tell me that they spend the first hour of every morning going through their e-mail messages. I'd like to use my time more carefully."

"I picked such seemingly disparate essays, I thought it was important to say what was the guiding principle in the selection rather than focus on any one essay. I reached for some principle that had been subconscious in me and lifted it into consciousness. Authenticity and sincerity were the most important unifying principles of all these apparently different essays."

"I re-read a lot of books that I like a lot. There are some books that I try to reread every couple of years. A good book changes for you every few years because you are in a different place in your own life."

"I should have written books instead of reading them."

"I have no opposition at all to technology. I think technology is a wonderful thing that has to be used thoughtfully, and we can't just assume that every bit of new technology improvesthe quality of life; it's really in how the technology is used. What I am very disturbed about is this trend of everything happening faster and faster and faster and there being more and more general noise in the world, and less and less time for quiet reflection on who we are, and where we're going."

"I oppose any belief that contradicts experimental evidence as determined by the methods of science. All beliefs not in such contradiction may be considered as faith. Whether faith in a particular belief is beneficial or not is another matter."

"I spend a lot of time just listening to the ospreys. I watch them go through their life cycle. They spend the winter in South America. The mother and father osprey stay together. It's a monogamous relationship. And every summer they raise a new brood of children. They came back to the nest in the middle of April. They take separate vacations in the winter - the mother and father..."

"I still will sit down at the piano and play when I am wrestling with something emotionally or just want to move into the musical world."

"I think Joe Leiberman has been one of the leaders of the country... people have such a broad respect for him as a moral force."

"I think it is always a long shot getting a book made into a film. Making that book into a film is going to be quite a challenge."

"I think people all over the institution recognize that different ways of understanding are valuable. Artists may think in a different way than biologists or chemists, but you can learn something from that. It is true that the arts at MIT don't have the same amount of funding or same status as the sciences or engineering."

"I think all tragedies are best told with some humor. You have to relieve the darkness to let the reader get through it. Also, that life has happiness and sadness mixed together. If you told a story that was all darkness, it wouldn't be real."

"I think e-mail is representative of our fast food mentality in the United States, where everything has gotten faster and faster, and we're required to respond to inputs more quickly with less time for thought and reflection. I believe that we need to slow down."

"I think that the scienti?c way of looking at the world, and the humanistic way of looking at the world are complementary. There are important differences which should be preserved, and in trying to do away with those differences we would lose something the same way as if we tried to make all religions one religion or all races one race. There is a cultural diversity that's very valuable, and it's valuable to have different ways of looking at the world."

"I think what gets you through a small writing project, is just one burst of inspiration. A book, especially a longer book, it's a different kind of force that pushes you through it. It's a vision of the whole thing."

"I was always troubled and awed by the big questions. Why are we here? Why is there something rather than nothing? What is the meaning of life? How did the universe begin?"

"I would think that you are more fluent with the rational. It has its appeal. But the irrational permits a greater exercise of ... shall we say, power."

"I want to approach the time because I want to get close to God."

"If a person holds no ambitions in this world, he suffers unknowingly. If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly."

"If I were not a writer, I would spend more time doing the things that I am already doing, which include doing research in physics, teaching, and running a nonprofit organization with a mission to empower women in Cambodia."

"I wouldn't overall say that The Diagnosis it's a funny book. I would say that it has comic moments. It's a modern tragedy."

"If the past has uncertain effect on the present, there is no need to dwell on the past. And if the present has little effect on the future,"

"If against our wishes and hopes, we are stuck with mortality, does mortality grant a beauty and grandeur all its own? Even though we struggle and howl against the brief flash of our lives, might we find something majestic in that brevity? Could there be a preciousness and value to existence stemming from the very fact of its temporary duration? And I think of the night-blooming cereus, a plant that looks like a leathery weed most of the year. But for one night each summer its flower opens to reveal silky white petals, which encircle yellow lacelike threads, and another whole flower like a tiny sea anemone within the outer flower. By morning, the flower has shriveled. One night of the year, as delicate and fleeting as a life in the universe."

"If the multiverse idea is correct, then the historic mission of physics to explain all the properties of our universe in terms of fundamental principles--to explain why the properties of our universe must necessarily be what they are--is futile, a beautiful philosophical dream that simply isn't true. Our universe is what it is because we are here. The situation could be likened to a school of intelligent fish who one day began wondering why their world is completely filled with water. Many of the fish, the theorists, hope to prove that the entire cosmos necessarily has to be filled with water. For years, they put their minds to the task but can never quite seem to prove their assertion. Then, a wizened group of fish postulates that maybe they are fooling themselves. Maybe there are, they suggest, many other worlds, some of them completely dry, and everything in between."

"I'm humbled and enormously grateful to be connected to [Franz] Kafka in any way. He is one of the writers I admire. I think he has been a big influence on me. I appreciate the idea of the individual person battling the society - which is true in all his books."

"If time and the passage of events are the same, then time moves barely at all. If time and events are not the same, then it is only people who barely move. If a person holds no ambitions in this world, he suffers unknowingly. If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly."

"I'm still happy with the way Einstein's Dreams came out. That book came out of a single inspiration. I really felt like I was not creating the words, that I was hearing the words. That someone else was speaking the words to me and I was just writing them down. It was a very strange experience. That can happen with a short book. I don't think it could happen with a long book."

"Imagine a world in which there is no time. Only images."

"If you over-plot your book you strangle your characters. Your characters have to have enough freedom and life to be able to surprise you."

"In a world in which time is a circle, every handshake, every kiss, every birth, every word, will be repeated precisely."

"In a world of fixed future, life is an infinite corridor of rooms, one room lit at each moment, the next room dark but prepared. We walk from room to room, look into the room that is lit, the present moment, then walk on. We do not know the rooms ahead, but we know we cannot change them. We are spectators of our lives."

"In a world of fixed future, there can be no right or wrong. Right and wrong demand freedom of choice, but if each action is already chosen, there can be no freedom of choice. In a world of fixed future, no person is responsible. The rooms are already arranged."