David Lodge Quotes

To read is to surrender oneself to an endless displacement of curiosity and desire from one sentence to another

The most interesting letters I received about 'The Name of the Rose' were from people in the Midwest that maybe didn't understand exactly, but wanted to understand more and who were excited by this picture of a world which was not their own.

But if Shakespeare himself is maybe about meaning and truth, I don't know, then he is certainly about pleasure and interest, we start with pleasure and interest, but maybe eventually it gets to meaning and truth.

This desire of knowledge and the wonder which it hopes to satisfy are the driving power behind all the changes that we, with careless, question-begging inference, call progress.

I am very interested in asking questions, and I am very interested in being involved in shows that ask people to think and feel.

Americans are genuinely and profoundly anti-intellectual. They are especially so in their pleasure-seeking, which is epically banal.

Reading is performance. The reader--the child under the blanket with a flashlight, the woman at the kitchen table, the man at the library desk--performs the work. The performance is silent. The readers hear the sounds of the words and the beat of the sentences only in their inner ear. Silent drummers on noiseless drums. An amazing performance in an amazing theater.

I like to say, when asked why I pursue science, that it is to satisfy my curiosity, that I am by nature a searcher trying to understand. If you haven't found something strange during the day, it hasn't been much of a day.

I want to fill every part of you, breathe the air from your lungs and leave my handprints on your soul. I want to give you more pleasure than you can bear.

The scientist, by the very nature of his commitment, creates more and more questions, never fewer. Indeed the measure of our intellectual maturity, one philosopher suggests, is our capacity to feel less and less satisfied with our answers to better problems.

Curiosity is only vanity. Most frequently we wish not to know, but to talk. We would not take a sea voyage for the sole pleasure of seeing without hope of ever telling.

The pleasures arising from thinking and learning will make us think and learn all the more. 1153a 23

The desire to know is natural to good men.

I want the part of you that you refuse to give.

You have to have curiosity in life. The moment you don't have any more curiosity, then don't do anything. Retire and stay in your house.

The most important attitude that can be formed is that of desire to go on learning.

Doubt . . . impels a search for the truth. It opens the door to knowledge. Faith puts a lock on the door. Indeed, . . . faith anesthetizes the desire to seek knowledge and truth.

My problem is that all things are increasingly interesting to me

The desire for knowledge shapes a man.

One of the benefits of a bad education is the constant pleasure of discovery.

I coveted you. I had no right to want you--but I reached out and took you anyway. And now look what's become of you! Trying to seduce a vampire.

I don't think people are averse to thinking about things in a deep way, but we have limited time and opportunity to think about things in a deep way. I think that's why there is an appetite for non-fiction - it gives people the opportunity to reexamine ordinary experience and be smarter about it.

Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn't ask ourselves what it says but what it means.

The days on which one has been the most inquisitive are among the days on which one has been happiest.

My feeling, however, is that films that are open are more productive for the audience. The films that, if I'm in a cinema, and I'm watching a movie that answers all the questions that it raises, it's a film that bores me. In the same way, if I'm reading a book that doesn't leave me with questions, moving questions, that I feel confronted with, then for me it's a waste of time. I don't want to read a book that simply confirms what I already know.