A Quote by Andrew Neel
The human animal is a fascinating beast. Watching people and trying to learn how and why they do things, and to engage in the somewhat futile attempt to explain them...it's my reason for living I guess...to ask 'why?'. I don't know what else to do with myself. In some strange way it's probably an attempt to understand myself and my own relationship to the world.
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So much of my writing derives from these questions that I ask myself - things that are utterly beyond my personal set of experiences - and it's my attempt to try to... understand, to sort of break out of my own consciousness, you know, the limitations of my own life.
Science is not the means by which we come to understand why physical laws and circumstances are the way they are. When we ask why - assuming the question is really 'why' and not 'how' - we are really asking to know the motive of some responsible agent capable of reason.
Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of a bird? Why does one love the night, flowers, everything around one, without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting people have to understand. If only they would realize above all that an artist works of necessity, that he himself is only a trifling bit of the world, and that no more importance should be attached to him than to plenty of other things which please us in the world, though we can't explain them. People who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree.
I think when things happen in our lives that we can't truly understand why they destroy us, it's because we can't truly understand or communicate it to anyone else. And that is what is destructive - you can't communicate it to the people that you love and it makes things deteriorate. Or you're hiding from yourself, or you're hiding from somebody else, and that was really fascinating to me... that life isn't like the movies and you can't always point to one thing and explain why you did things that ended up hurting you.
All of us suffer some injuries from experiences that seem to have no rhyme or reason. We cannot understand or explain them. We may never know why some things happen in this life. The reason for some of our suffering is known only to the Lord.
There are some things about myself I can’t explain to anyone. There are some things I don’t understand at all. I can’t tell what I think about things or what I’m after. I don’t know what my strengths are or what I’m supposed to do about them. But if I start thinking about these things in too much detail the whole thing gets scary. And if I get scared I can only think about myself. I become really self-centered, and without meaning to, I hurt people. So I’m not such a wonderful human being.
I know I am a human being. I can give myself to one year for a project. That is why I say I'm primitive in the way I work, especially compared to most artists. I came to New York in 1974, knowing that it is the art center of the world. But I didn't go to find people for my work. I do the work, and the people come to me, and I learn from them. That has always been my approach - to do the job first and then to respond to it after I finish and learn what people think about it. That's how I develop, and I'm more of an outsider in that way.
I think if you ask people why they watch me, there would be some common thread among all of them that I'm somewhat of an awkward older sister. I have a teen, mostly female demographic. How that happened, I don't know. But I think they see me as some sort of bizarre role model, and I'll keep trying to do that for them.
Common sense, to me, is simple. And I've never understood why there aren't a lot of people trying to figure out how the United States became this special place and then try to replicate it around the world, because that's the solution to the human condition. The solution to poverty, the solution to misery, the solution to backwards living is the United States of America. Why not learn how that happened, learn why and how we happened. What is it that made it special?
One of my moments of coming to writing, of needing to write to attempt to create myself, to attempt to absolve and understand my past passivity, came when a girl I loved very much, who I had been estranged from for some time, killed herself.
I’ve often been told that I’m a bit strange. I hear that pretty regularly, but it is not how I see myself. I feel like I’m extremely normal. I do have a bizarre face that’s a bit out of proportion. I guess that’s why some people see me as strange.
I think fiction, for me, is a way of trying to understand why people do the things they do - and trying to explain what is, at heart, illogical.
The mathematical question is "Why?" It's always why. And the only way we know how to answer such questions is to come up, from scratch, with these narrative arguments that explain it. So what I want to do with this book is open up this world of mathematical reality, the creatures that we build there, the questions that we ask there, the ways in which we poke and prod (known as problems), and how we can possibly craft these elegant reason-poems.
I am a nonbeliever myself. But I think there's so much about religion that is not factual in nature as to why people engage with it and what it means to them. You can debunk why you think there's no physical evidence for God and why the story of Jesus didn't really happen that way and stuff like that all the live-long day, and it's not going to make a difference to what role religion has in people's lives and how they feel about it and how it makes their lives better or worse.
I know why people lie to themselves in life, but I'll never understand the appeal of the dishonest theater where the actor doesn't make some earnest attempt to include their own honest humanity in their collaboration with an author. It's so ugly to me that it hurts sometimes to see it happen.
I spent most of my teen years trying to figure out the rules of life, theories for why things happened, why people behaved as they did, and mostly I came to the conclusion that either there were no rules, or the rules sucked. Reading science fiction wasn't about imagining myself into some more exciting life filled with adventure, it was about finding a world where things worked the way I wanted them to.
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