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T Quotes

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All T Quotes

“The desire to be liked is acceptable in real life but very problematic in fiction. Pleasantness is the enemy of good fiction. I try to write on the premise that no one is going to read my work. Because there's this terrible impulse to grovel before the reader, to make them like you, to write with the reader in mind in that way. It prevents you doing work that is ugly or upsetting or difficult. The temptation is to not be true to what you want to write and to be considerate or amusing instead. I'm always trying to fight against the impulse to make my readers like me.”

“The desire to be seen as superior and singular- and, conversely, but similarly, inferior and individual, is a big topic...They have a term for the syndrome- it is called terminal uniqueness...we all refuse to be part of the crowd, to walk in the middle of the road in the safety of others. We all think were special. But the problem is, as I point out to Dr. Singer all the time, I actually am special.”

“The desire to categorize humans along racial lines, and the impulse to superpose attributes such as intelligence (or criminality, creativity, or violence) on those lines, illustrates a general theme concerning genetics and categorization. Like the English novel, or the face, say, the human genome can be lumped and split in a million different ways. But whether to split or lump, to categorize or synthesize, is a choice. ... The narrower the definition of the heritable feature or the trait, the more likely we will find a genetic locus for that trait, and the more likely we will find that the trait will segregate within some human sub-population.”

“The desire to convince oneself that writing is at least as alive as life itself, was recently reflected by a New York Times report on brain-scan research which claims that as we read about action in novels the areas of the brain that would be responsible for such action in real life—those that respond to sound, smell, texture, movement, etc.—are activated by words. 'The brain, it seems,' writes the journalist, 'does not make much distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life: in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated.' What nonsense! As if reading about sex or violence in any way prepared us for the experience of its intensity.”

“The desire to create is one of the deepest yearnings of the human soul. No matter our talents, education, backgrounds, or abilities, we each have an inherent wish to create something that did not exist before. Creation brings satisfaction and fulfillment. We develop ourselves and others when we take organized matter into our hands and mold it into something of beauty.”