Ian Hart Quotes

I do all my shopping on the Web. I do much of my research online. I have a blog, too. It is definitely a distraction. It is definitely a blessing. What blessing isn't a distraction, though?

The Age of Information, Has turned out to be the Age of Ignorance.

Cable television and the Internet have created an unending demand for information, and there simply isn't enough truth to go around.

With the profusion of images and the Internet, you can get any truth you want.

The sheer amount of information available weirdly encourages informational overconfidence … ‘evidence’ for any belief you have — I mean any belief — can be found on the internet.

Someone once said that if you sat a million monkeys at a million typewriters for a million years, one of them would eventually type out all of Hamlet by chance. But when we find the text of Hamlet, we don't wonder whether it came from chance and monkeys. Why then does the atheist use that incredibly improbable explanation for the universe? Clearly, because it is his only chance of remaining an atheist. At this point we need a psychological explanation of the atheist rather than a logical explanation of the universe.

If one puts an infinite number of monkeys in front of typewriters, and lets them clap away, there is a certainty that one of them will come out with an exact version of the 'Iliad.'

One thing that the Internet has created is the sense that information is at your fingertips, when it's really only a very, very limited, specific, and slanted kind of information.

If I let my fingers wander idly over the keys of a typewriter it might happen that my screed made an intelligible sentence. If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters they might write all the books in the British Museum. The chance of their doing so is decidedly more favourable than the chance of the molecules returning to one half of the vessel.

If you're lucky, you don't think in a straight line.

Masterpieces are only lucky attempts.

Do as many ideas as possible. The right idea will pick you.

There seems to be a strange affectation in authors of appearing to have done everything by chance.

I wake up in the morning and I lie in bed, and it's the time I call "the theater of morning." All these thoughts run around in my head, between my ears when I'm waking up. It's not a dream state, but it's not completely awake either. So all these metaphors run around and then I pick one and I get out of bed and I do it. I'm very lucky.

Coordinating there Events and objects with remote events And vanished objects. Making ornaments Of accidents and possibilities.

When at the typewriter I am no longer where I site but am away across the mountains, in ancient cities or on the Great Plains among the buffalo. Often I think of what pitiful fools are those who use mind-altering drugs to seek feelings they do not have, each drug taking a little more from what they have of mind, leaving them a little less. Give the brain encouragement from study, from thinking, from visualizing, and no drugs are needed.

Never before in human history has more bad information been available to more people.

Our whole educational and cultural system is not designed to provide those intellectual tools, so people are often lost and the internet often becomes kind of a cult generator.

If I spend 100 days in a row making music there’s a chance nothing will come of it. But if I spend 100 days not making music it’s guaranteed that nothing will come of it. So keep working.

Internet news cycles are by the minute, and any fool can take a headline from the Associated Press and send it out as news.

The most amazing combinations can result if you shuffle the pack enough.

Chance is the only source of true novelty.

When I sit down at the typewriter, I write. Someone once asked me if I had a fixed routine before I start, like setting up exercises, sharpening pencils, or having a drink of orange juice. I said, "No, the only thing I do before I start writing is to make sure that I'm close enough to the typewriter to reach the keys."

Here's the new art of the twenty-first century: the art of curating, the art of plucking all the good stuff from a superabundance of crap.