Theoretical Thinking Quotes

There's always a tension in my world between the pragmatic and the practical and the theoretical. I have a very theoretical turn of mind, but I also like to test things in place.

When I'm writing a book, sentence by sentence, I'm not thinking theoretically. I'm just trying to work out the story from inside the characters I've got.

My scientist friends have come up with things like 'principles of uncertainty' and dark holes. They're willing to live inside imagined hypotheses and theories. But many religious folks insist on answers that are always true. We love closure, resolution and clarity, while thinking that we are people of 'faith'! How strange that the very word 'faith' has come to mean its exact opposite.

My mom is an experimental chemist and physicist, so she is a cut-and-dried, nuts-and-bolts kind of woman, and my dad is a theoretical chemist, so we were definitely raised with his philosophical point of view: imaginary numbers and dimensions beyond our own. That's the kind of thing we would talk about.

I think of an intellectual as just being bookish, being interested in history books, utopian ideas, that kind of thing.

I'm a vague, conjunctured personality, more made up of opinions and academic prepossessions than of human traits and red corpuscles.

There's a certain kind of academic that comes to Washington and can't survive. They're the ones starting each sentence with 'The economic model says.'

As a kid, I was less interested in the physical tinkering than thinking about what we would now call the physics, as opposed to the engineering.