So many of the things I talk about in 'Reality Hunger' seem to be the things that 'The Thing About Life' does - things like risk, contradiction, compression, mixing modes of attack from the memoristic gesture to data-crunching.
I've seen 'Goodfellas' a hundred times, and one of the things that I take away from that movie is dynamic pacing and energy. I just think that film is sort of a paragon of excellence in filmmaking and the compression of narrative.
Computations are everywhere, once you begin to look at things in a certain way.
Stories where the author has known very little, but run a computer program that tells him how to construct a planet, and looked up specific things about rocketry and so on, really suck.
Computers make it easier to do a lot of things, but most of the things they make it easier to do don't need to be done.
The computing world is very good at things that we are not. It is very good at memory.
A lot of our writers, like Conan O'Brien, moved on to other things.
Not all things are to be discovered; many are better concealed.
In 1998 Harry Reid and I had a very close race. It was less than a tenth of a percentage point. We had a reasonable recount. There were a lot of things that I could have pursued at the time, but I just felt that at the time that I should have, you know, conceded the race.
Me, I've concentrated on music pretty much to the exclusion of other things.
How many things there are concerning which we might well deliberate whether we had better know them.
We are least open to precise knowledge concerning the things we are most vehement about.
A concerted effort to preserve our heritage is a vital link to our cultural, educational, aesthetic, inspirational, and economic legacies - all of the things that quite literally make us who we are.
Genius - to know without having learned; to draw just conclusions from unknown premises; to discern the soul of things.
Wit invents; inspiration reveals. The inventions of wit are conceits - metaphors and paradoxes - that discover the secret correspondences that unite beings and things among and with themselves; inspiration is condemned to dissipate its revelations - unless a form can be found to contain them.
The friend of the present order of things condemns all political speculations in the gross.
Science is Christian, not when it condemns itself to the letter of things, but when, in the infinitely little, it discovers as many mysteries and as much depth and power as in the infinitely great.
There's something about me that suggests I don't have an intelligent atom in me at all. So people say things to me that they wouldn't say to other people. Insulting, condescending things. They don't think I notice. But, of course, I'm taking it all in.
No one would choose a friendless existence on condition of having all the other things in the world.
Nothing in the universe is contingent, but all things are conditioned to exist and operate in a particular manner by the necessity of the divine nature.
