Brandon Sanderson Quotes

I tend to pull nuggets out of many books - rather than having a handful of books that serve as guiding lights.

Well, I am a dilettante. It's only in England that dilettantism is considered a bad thing. In other countries it's called interdisciplinary research.

Read much, but not many books.

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.

It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything.

I had been writing for about twelve years. I knew pretty well how you could find things out, but I had never been trained in an academic way how to go about the research.

I don't do research. I never have.

I really enjoy researching, and for almost every piece, I research enough to write a book.

Research can be a big clunker. It's difficult to know how you can make the historical light.

When I'm sniffing around new territory, I often choose, rather randomly, one general book and then follow its bibliography and notes to other, more specialized works and to the primary source material.

I think that's not a question that one can answer accurately. I read a whole range of books, quite a lot of history at the time, and still do read a lot. I read very widely.

To do successful research, you don't need to know everything, you just need to know one thing that isn't known.

I'm a research queen.

To have real issues to delve into, research-wise, always makes it a lot more satisfying to me. I can pull from a lot of resources and put them into my work and just have as much information as possible.

I'm not a huge fan of research, but sometimes you get an idea, and then you realize you don't know anything.

The sciences, even the best,-mathematics and astronomy,-are like sportsmen, who seize whatever prey offers, even without being able to make any use of it.

The sequence of theorist, experimenter, and discovery has occasionally been compared to the sequence of farmer, pig, truffle. The farmer leads the pig to an area where there might be truffles. The pig searches diligently for the truffles. Finally, he locates one, and just as he is about to devour it, the farmer snatches it away.

Basically, I'm a perpetual student. I start by finding a subject I really don't know very much, but that I'm curious about. I learn about it through books in a library, by doing interviews with people who know a lot about the subject, and by going out on my own and seeing for myself what's happening.

Even today few scientists and perhaps even fewer nonscientists realize that science is a method and nothing else.

the only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind. No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this; nor is it in the nature of human intellect to become wise in any other manner.

The main insight learned from interdisciplinary studies is the return to specialization

The wise man knows of all things, as far as possible, although he has no knowledge of each of them in detail

I only ask for information.

Of course, the more you read, the more you learn, and ultimately there is more information than you can ever use. The difficulty is that as an outsider, you know you're too ignorant for your own good, and so the urge to keep researching and *never* start writing is pretty strong.

In our own time, through integrative sciences like ecology and animal behavior and psychology we have re-understood what was forgotten during the reduction centuries of modern science. We've re-understood that the world is one thing, and it's a living thing. It's a thing with an intent and a spirit within it, and this is the key concept.