Peripheral Vision famous quotes

For a while I used to listen to those whispers about babies costing you books, and Cyril Connolly's loathsome quote that "There is no more somber enemy of good art than the pram in the hall." But it's rubbish. Absolute rubbish. A huge amount of your work is done when you're not at your desk. Knotty problems that you need your unconscious to solve. So it can be helpful to walk away and focus on other things and it can be helpful to be a bit harassed in your daily life, to be hungry for time to write.

As a student of history, I also know civilization's debt to Islam.

Be grateful, be smart, be clean, be true, be humble, be prayerful.

If the plan is to see what happens, a team is guaranteed to succeed - at seeing what happens - but won't necessarily gain validated learning - If you cannot fail, you cannot learn.

I feel great. I had a triple bypass in 1976 and a quadruple bypass in 1984.

Yes, I laugh at all mankind, and the imposition that they dare to practice when they talk of hearts. I laugh at human passions and human cares, vice and virtue, religion and impiety; they are all the result of petty localities, and artificial situation. One physical want, one severe and abrupt lesson from the colorless and shriveled lip of necessity, is worth all the logic of the empty wretches who have presumed to prate it, from Zeno down to Burgersdicius. It silences in a second all the feeble sophistry of conventional life, and ascetical passion.

In the past, two colleagues died each season. It was generally accepted this could happen.

When I was young, I would sit in the bath and ideas would come to me. But I'm not young any more, so now I just sit in the bath.

[Every disappointment or misfortune can become a blessing in disguise, for which we should be grateful. But only if the hidden blessing is anticipated, expected and searched for will it be found and recognised as such and the most made of it. For example...] Many a man curses the rain that falls upon his head, and knows not that it brings abundance to drive away hunger.

Be aware that who you are and what you have to offer can be a beacon to some lost soul.