Analytical Insight Quotes

Statistics do not convey emotion. They shock us for a minute or two, and then we click again.

In a way, perhaps, there's an advantage of being on the edge of something and looking in as the observer, because as the filmmaker, you're the storyteller, and you're pulling out this universal story.

One of the pleasures of looking at the world through mathematical eyes is that you can see certain patterns that would otherwise be hidden.

Even in the most purely logical realms, it is insight that first arrives at what is new.

Announcers don't do enough of the cat-and-mouse strategy and all the work that goes into it. You watch a broadcast and guys get the pitches wrong.

The truly privileged theories are not the ones referring to any particular scale of size or complexity, nor the ones situated at any particular level of the predictive hierarchy, but the ones that contain the deepest explanations.

The critic is genius at one remove; he is not unlike an actor on the stage, and incarnates in his mind, as the actor embodies in his person, another's work; only thus does he understand art, realize it, know it; and having arrived at this, his task is done.

I think that writers are, at best, outsiders to the society they inhabit. They have a kind of detachment, or try to have.

Auden is a poet - no, the poet - of unembarrassed intellect. Ideas are his emotions, emotions are his ideas.

Mathematicians may flatter themselves that they possess new ideas which mere human language is as yet unable to express.

But I have bad taste with a deep fount of intellectuality.

What's overwhelmingly clear is 'Havana' didn't work for people, but why it didn't work I don't feel I can put my finger on in a way I can learn from.

I write about what worries me and, hopefully, things worry me a little bit earlier than they do some other people, purely because I am a writer and it is my job to go out there and be worried by things.

Genius not only diagnoses the situation but supplies the answers.

You need a continuous picture of how things are evolving, and not a slow series of snapshots where you don't know how frame A is related to frame B.

Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries.

I kind of write about visual art the way Roger Angell writes about baseball, which is to say, you're writing about life: it's a somewhat focused, limited terrain in which you write about everything.