“His intellectual nerve-endings were so finely tuned that he experienced the onset of fresh ideas like orgasms, and mourned their passing as the end of treasured love affairs.” Michael Scammell on Arthur Koestler
From the New Yorker:
“Sometimes, on the way to an appointment, he’ll check his reflection in the mirror and declare, ‘That’s good enough for the girls I go with.’” https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/04/25/kuwait-on-the-prairie
On America, from Shantaram
“And I’d like to go back some day. I think I love it there, most of all. There’s something so confident and open-hearted and… and BRAVE about America and the American people. I don’t feel American – at least I don’t think I do – but I’m comfortable with them, if you know what I […]
Up your work rate and quality will come
“A genius is a genius, Simonton maintains, because he can put together such a staggering number of insights, ideas, theories, random observations, and unexpected connections that he almost inevitably ends up with something great. ‘Quality,’ Simonton writes, is ‘a probabilistic function of quantity’” Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker.
A quote no-one in D.C. has ever heard:
“Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position. But certainty is an absurd one.” – Voltaire