William Harvey Quotes
I profess to learn and to teach anatomy not from books but from dissections, not from the tenets of Philosophers but from the fabric of Nature.
Quotes to Explore
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Readers want to have the confidence that you understand the era in which the book is set, so for 'The Perfumer's Secret,' I needed to know everything about the First World War from a French perspective. I had to understand those people and that town in 1914.
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It takes me a long time writing books. It takes me about five years to write a book, and when I'm done, the last thing I want to do is to do it again.
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I started submitting stories for publication when I was about 15, but it was many years before I sold anything. I don't make my living writing science fiction, so in that sense, I'm still not a pro.
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My own writing has perhaps more of an American flavor than a British one, but that's because the stories I've so far written have needed it. 'Empire State,' 'Seven Wonders' and 'The Age Atomic' are all very place-centric, where the setting itself is almost a character. But there is a universality to story that isn't just limited to science fiction.
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For me, the whole process involves envisioning this book in my head as I'm working.
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I read a lot of comic books and any kind of thing I could find. One day, a teacher found me. She grabbed my comic book and tore it up. I was really upset, but then she brought in a pile of books from her own library. That was the best thing that ever happened to me.
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Every well-written book is a light for me. When you write, you use other writers and their books as guides in the wilderness.
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I see it as a responsibility of mine to teach others.
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My method is, I just sit down and write a book.
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For the mind is all the easier to teach before it is set.
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What I look for in any book is an argument, based on evidence, that changes the way I think about something important.
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The book is like the spoon, scissors, the hammer, the wheel. Once invented, it cannot be improved. You cannot make a spoon that is better than a spoon... The book has been thoroughly tested, and it's very hard to see how it could be improved on for its current purposes.
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So many people are working in vaudeville today that I looked for three weeks to book enough acts for an hour bill and didn't have them until the night before we opened in Buffalo and money was no object!
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Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed.
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While I'm writing, I'm also the first reader, and I want to write a book where I'm excited about what happens next.
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I used to teach improv courses in Amsterdam where we would do team-building exercises, and they can go south very quickly.
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I cite in my book countless examples of the foundational documents of the colonial period in America and the writings of the leaders, that this was intended to be a Christian nation.
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Octavia Butler often described herself as an outsider, but within science fiction, she was loved as an insider, someone who was a fan first and came to S.F. writing as an enthusiastic reader.
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It makes it easier to adapt a book that is popular with kids because of how excited they are about the project; you don't get the criticisms you would get with other projects.
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Let me tell you something about my family. We're as thick as thieves and we protect each other 'til the end.
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I remember looking through magazines or watching movies even just a couple of years ago and being like, 'I really want to be part of that,' but not realizing what that was.
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When prayer, rituals and ascetic life are just a means of self-indulgence, they are harmful rather than beneficial. This is quite obvious to people nowadays, when it is widely recognised that fixations are not the same as valuable and laudable observances. One should not pray if that prayer is vanity; rituals are wrong when they provide lower satisfactions, like emotional stimulus instead of enlightenment; he or she should not be an ascetic who is only enjoying it.
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I profess to learn and to teach anatomy not from books but from dissections, not from the tenets of Philosophers but from the fabric of Nature.
