Intellectual interests Quotes

Social progress is a big thing for me. Although science fiction is traditionally concerned with the hard sciences, which is chemistry, physics, and, some might argue, biology, my father was and still is a social scientist at the University of Toronto.

I was fascinated by quotations and lists. And then I noticed that other people were fascinated by quotations and lists: people as different as Borges and Walter Benjamin, Novalis and Godard.

Seeing one's books on the shelf tells you so much about the way somebody has, over the years, put together their private library, which is a reflection of their minds and their selves.

Am I an intellectual? I don't think so. Less than people sometimes think, I have to say. But more than some others think.

Thinking man's crumpet? Well, it's more flattering than being a lobotomised man's crumpet, I suppose.

I've been watching a lot of Joan Didion interviews on YouTube. I love her. My drummer has gotten me into looking at Terence McKenna interviews.

It's no fun to be a bluestocking in a family of jockstraps.

To know a man's library is, in some measure, to know a man's mind.

I suppose I have the tastes of someone who teaches at a university in the provinces.

I loved nearly all my teachers; but it was not till I went home to live at Oxford, in 1867, that I awoke intellectually to a hundred interests and influences that begin much earlier nowadays to affect any clever child.

Philistine - a word which I understand properly to denote indifference to the higher intellectual interests. The word may also be defined, however, as the name applied by prigs to the rest of their species.