Simon Raven Quotes

I did a lot of my writing as though I was an academic, doing some piece of research as perfectly as possible.

I have a great respect for the academics who are working with the source material. My hat's off to them.

Do your homework and stand your ground.

It is difficult to describe in short the enthusiasm and devotion provoked by and given to my research. We lived almost in poverty. I used pencils, two for a nickel, and could not buy a fountain pen, when I lost mine.

I spent 10 years working on a math Ph.D., and I finally got kind of good at it.

A scholar who cherishes the love of comfort is not fit to be deemed a scholar.

I've written what and when I want to. It's been about expressing myself. But with the degree, I had to learn to do everything in a very specific, disciplined way. I am very disciplined, but this demanded a totally different kind of discipline. A real challenge.

No scientist, engineer, writer, psychologist, artist, or physician - and certainly no scholar, and therefore no serious university faculty member - pursues his or her vocation by getting right answers from a set of prescribed alternatives that trivialize complexity and ambiguity.

I once asked a young dissertation writer whether her suddenly grayed hair was due to ill health or personal tragedy; she answered: “It was the footnotes”.

Thing is, I wasn't in the library, didn't study too much, didn't get the best grades, but honestly, I didn't party a lot either. I stayed in a lot.

When you lead a life of scholarship you can't be bothered with the humorous realities, you know, tits, that kind of thing.

I wanted to get everything right. I was super nerdy and academic. I got so much satisfaction out of getting good grades.

I feel a near passion for intelligence at grips with itself and not letting go.

I had no money to buy books, so between classes and work, I haunted the library. I even tutored in French with a sliding scale of payment: twenty dollars for an A, fifteen for a B, ten for a C, five for a D.

It's the fact that you can reduce my whole life to one word, whatever it is, my entire career, my service to my country, my academic rigor, my courage in going to interview terrorists, and refugee camps, and third-world prisons.

In a man devoted to knowledge, pity seems almost ridiculous, like delicate hands on a cyclops.

I love to lose myself in a mystery to pursue my reason to an O altitudo.

Science is competitive, aggressive, demanding. It is also imaginative, inspiring, uplifting.

I've concluded that getting the categories right is an absolutely crucial step to building useful management theory, and unfortunately too few writers do this. You've got to engage in serious scholarship, and then figure out how to write it in a way that lots of people can understand.

The best university that can be recommended to a man of ideas is the gauntlet of the mob.

Education isn't play--and it can't be made to look like play. It is hard, hard work. But it can be made interesting work.

Maybe that is the best lesson I learned in my first semester at Yale, because if I had gone to a less-demanding school and continued to sail along on the top, I am sure I would never have attained the subsequent achievements in my life.

Who doesn't feel studious when he doesn't have a girl with a Riviera suntan?

Knowledge is praised and desired by multitudes whom her charms could never rouse from the couch of sloth; whom the faintest invitation of pleasure draws away from their studies; to whom any other method of wearing the day is more eligible than the use of books, and who are more easily engaged by any conversation than such as may rectify their notions or enlarge their comprehension.

I tell them that if they will occupy themselves with the study of mathematics they will find in it the best remedy against the lusts of the flesh.