Dave Barry Quotes

Theorists write all the popular books on science: Heinz Pagels, Frank Wilczek, Stephen Hawking, Richard Feynman, et al. And why not? They have all that spare time.

I'm doing a book, 'Chasing Science,' about the pleasures of science as a spectator sport.

In my youth, I spent my time investigating insects.

I'm so convinced that hiking helps my writing that I recently decided to offer a series of hiking-writing workshops to see if others had the same experience.

'Genes, Girls, and Gamow' was an attempt, even more than 'The Double Helix,' to mix science with one's personal life. With 'The Double Helix,' no one had done it before, but I thought I'd try.

While I was thinking about the next film to do, I was also reading this book by Diane Ackerman called 'The Natural History of the Senses' - an anthropological and sociological look at the senses. But it also has this great sense of enthusiasm.

I read anything that’s going to be interesting. But you don’t know what it is until you’ve read it. Somewhere in a book on the history of false teeth there’ll be the making of a novel.

I very much was inspired by Bill Bryson. He does cover science, but more often, it's a mixture of science and travel, and whatever he happens to be writing about - Shakespeare, Australia, the United Kingdom, or when he covers science in 'A Short History Of Nearly Everything' - he has an incredible ability to be both entertaining and enlightening.

With fiction, it could be about anything. It just has to be good writing, like Maria Semple's "Where'd You Go, Bernadette," which I read recently. I want to forget I have a book in my hand.

Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head.

It is interesting to note how many of the great scientific discoveries begin as myths.

For ten years, I wrote regular columns about science for women's magazines, and to my knowledge I'm the only person in the world who can say that. This has no kudos in either the science-writing world or the academic world, but it's one of the most challenging things I've ever done. It's much harder to write about cosmology for a magazine like Vogue than for the New York Times, which I've also written for, because you have to imagine that on the page opposite there'll be an advertisement for eyeliner, or an article about the latest trends in skirt length.

With "Taipei" Tao Lin becomes the most interesting prose stylist of his generation...

I like these nonfiction books where everything that is interesting about them is lost in that catch-all description of their "about"-ness.

[Herschel and Humboldt] stirred up in me a burning zeal to add even the most humble contribution to the noble structure of Natural Science. No one or a dozen other books influenced me nearly so much as these two. I copied out from Humboldt long passages about Teneriffe and read them aloud on one of [my walking excursions].

My most important piece of advice to all you would-be writers: when you write, try to leave out all the parts readers skip.

I try to write in a way where you care deeply what the next paragraph will be. I hear the rhythm of prose and that, to me, distinguishes great writing from ordinary writing. By the way, I don't even claim that I'm good. I claim that I value it.

I'm sure we would not have had men on the Moon if it had not been for Wells and Verne and the people who write about this and made people think about it. I'm rather proud of the fact that I know several astronauts who became astronauts through reading my books.

The actual materials are important. A book at the nightstand is important - a light you can get at - or a flashlight as Kerouac had a brakeman's latern.

You can write about anything, and if you write well enough, even the reader with no intrinsic interest in the subject will become involved.

There are books that a writer undertakes because she wants to go on a journey, and there are journeys a writer undertakes because she wants to write a book.

I tried to depict the human face of this history, I wanted to write a book that people would actually want to read.

Unless there is a strong sense of place there is no travel writing, but it need not come from topographical description; dialogue can also convey a sense of place. Even so, I insist, the traveler invents the place. Feeling compelled to comment on my travel books, people say to me, "I went there"---China, India, the Pacific, Albania-- "and it wasn't like that." I say, "Because I am not you.

The best book of the year, Grobel's writing is quite marvelous. The Hustons reads vividly, just like one of John Huston's great films.

but for my own part, if a book is well written, I always find it too short.