Richard Lewontin Quotes

I do think that every generation has its unique story.

The historical novelist has to consider what has actually happened, while the SF writer is dealing in possibilities, but they are both in the business of imagining a world unlike our own and yet connected to it.

I love reading and I love thinking - the reason that I love my books so much is that in order to write them I have to read and to think for years at a time about the same period of time.

Theories are always very thin and insubstantial, experience only is tangible.

I ask you to believe nothing that you cannot verify for yourself.

I consider myself to be a relatively sceptical person. I like to see evidence for myself, and try to avoid speculating beyond available evidence. But I also have to accept some things on trust.

I think the whole glory of writing lies in the fact that it forces us out of ourselves and into the lives of others.

A parent who from his own childhood experience is convinced of the value of fairy tales will have no difficulty in answering his child's questions; but an adult who thinks these tales are only a bunch of lies had better not try telling them; he won't be able to related them in a way which would enrich the child's life.

I actually do think the history is so epic that it actually kind of writes itself.

I learned that myth doesn’t mean a lie; it means a traditional story that tells you something about people and their worldview and what they hold sacred. Interesting.

I think that, in Hebrew, it's like the language creates a more unique and specific universe even before the story.

Science is the acceptance of what works and the rejection of what does not. That needs more courage than we might think.

Experience alone can decide on truth.

Do not think that it is possible to repeat another period.

Any platform that you use to tell stories helps you regardless of the medium regardless if they are bedtime stories that you tell your children or comics or film. Specifically what makes comics unique is that they are a storytelling device that forces you to think both visually and economically. Some might say you are limited by your imagination, but that is not true because someone has to draw it.

I have been always fascinated and seduced by history, which I think is very close, very close to literature.

I grew tired of religion some time not long after birth. I believe in people, I believe in humans, I believe in a car, but I don't believe something I can't have absolutely no evidence of for millenniums. And it's funny, people think analysis or psychiatry is mad, and they go to church.

I think it would be self-indulgent to go, "Oh, I'm going to make this character different by giving him a quirk of some kind." I don't think that serves the story, particularly. But even very similar scenes with a different set of actors, a different set of circumstances, it starts to evolve as a different character.

The store of fairy tales, that blue chamber where stories lie waiting to be rediscovered, holds out the promise of just those creative enchantments, not only for its own characters caught in its own plotlines; it offers magical metamorphoses to the one who opens the door, who passes on what was found there, and to those who hear what the storyteller brings. The faculty of wonder, like curiosity can make things happen; it is time for wishful thinking to have its due.

I think you'll find a lot of actors will be interested in history because it sparks your imagination so much. When you enter a period of history, your imagination just goes wild in creating the world, which is really what acting is.

I think one of the problems in determining the ending for a television series is that you don't know how long the show is gonna last. Particularly because we were in the unique position of adapting Tom's Perrotta novel The Leftovers, it always felt like the first season was gonna end with the end of Tom's novel, and then we would figure things out from there and look back.

Though now we think of fairy tales as stories intended for very young children, this is a relatively modern idea. In the oral tradition, magical stories were enjoyed by listeners young and old alike, while literary fairy tales (including most of the tales that are best known today) were published primarily for adult readers until the 19th century.

We [fiction writers] are much more of a maze than we are a motorway. Things are always in flux, they're always in movement, they're always twisting back on each other. I think the straight line is such a lie.

Water is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen. What if someone says, “Well, that’s not how I choose to think about water.”? All we can do is appeal to scientific values. And if he doesn’t share those values, the conversation is over. If someone doesn’t value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide to prove they should value it? If someone doesn’t value logic, what logical argument could you provide to show the importance of logic?