Daniel Levitin Quotes

If you hear a statistic, you will make up a story to go with it, because our brains are organized on narrative. And you may very well make up a wrong story because you only have one fact, which is a statistic.

When we read, we are doing more than delectating words on a page stories, characters, images, notions. We are communing with the mind of the author.

If one devalues rationality, the world tends to fall apart.

I never 'say' anything in my work. I invent a world. Let others decide what is being 'said'.

Intelligence is the ability to take in information from the world and to find patterns in that information that allow you to organize your perceptions and understand the external world.

Reading asks that you bring your whole life experience and your ability to decode the written word and your creative imagination to the page and be a co-author with the writer, because the story is just squiggles on the page unless you have a reader.

Everything is fiction. You only have your own life to work with in the way that a biographer only has the letters and journals to work with.

I think journalists and filmmakers are keen observers. And actors must also be sharp observers as they draw their characters and their stories from what they experience around them. After all, that is what actors, filmmakers, journalists are trained to be: observers. And then they do something with their observations.

I don't have a great imagination to share something with you that you don't know, so it's about interpreting things - a dialogue.

I recently read that it's the left brain that does all that calculating, and the right brain that does the poetry. Somehow I've veered way towards the left. I've been doing it for years. Maybe I do art to balance it out.

In many professions, what used to matter most were abilities associated with the left side of the brain: linear, sequential, spreadsheet kind of faculties. Those still matter, but they're not enough.

It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.

One can imagine that the ultimate mathematician is one who can see analogies between analogies.

My mind has become somewhat like a book. What I mean by that is that when I look at the world, I see it as a story.

Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.

Sometimes I like to list the strongest arguments I can find to support a point of view I think is wrong. When I have them before me, I am up against a real opponent rather than a hypothetical one that is an easy target for me to hit.

The fiction writer in me likes gaps in stories because I can jump into that gap and try to suggest something.

To me, mathematics, computer science, and the arts are insanely related. They're all creative expressions.

The truth is, as you know, people like us look at what's happening in the world, and then we project it forward. We think, 'If I know A and B, then I've got to know that C and D are coming,' and that's kind of the way it's been with my fiction.

Memory depends mainly upon myth. Some even occurs in our minds, in actuality or in fantasy; we form it in memory, molding it like clay day after day - and soon we have made out of that event a myth. We then keep the myth in memory as a guide to future similar situations.

Directing is extrovert and gregarious; writing is isolating, introverted, and lonely.

I hope my pieces have an authenticity to them, but my job is to filter the world and tell a story, not to define and recreate exactly what's going on.

I'm a relentless sketcher. It goes back to how you process the world around you - the whole left-brain, right-brain thing. Some people are data-driven. I've always been more visual.

When someone is on the phone telling me a story, I'm hearing the soundtrack that goes with it.

I think books make you think in a different way than movies and documentaries.