A Quote by E. L. Doctorow

From my undergraduate days, I've always been interested in the major philosophical questions that don't seem to have an answer that everyone agrees on.

E. L. Doctorow

Quote Topics

Always Answer Been Days Everyone Interested Major Philosophical Philosophical Questions Questions Seem Undergraduate

Quote Author

E. L. Doctorow
American - Novelist
January 6, 1931 - July 21, 2015

The reason I don't like interviews is that I seem to react violently to personal questions. If the questions are about the work, I try to answer them. When they are about me, I may answer or I may not, but even if I do, if the same question is asked tomorrow, the answer may be different.

William Faulkner

I did answer all of the questions put to me today, ... Nothing in my testimony in any way contradicted the strong denials that the president has made to these allegations, and since I have been asked to return and answer some additional questions, I think that it's best that I not answer any questions out here and reserve that to the grand jury.

John Podesta

I think there's some pretty amazing language in the Bible. The thing that's always been interesting to me about religion is that compared to the more modern spirituality, the West Coast pseudo-Buddhist thing that people go for these days, actual Buddhism and Islam have been looking at these philosophical questions, at really hard questions, for a long time. There's a lot of stuff that philosophy doesn't talk about, and in the secular world, a lot of times, people don't talk about these ideas, and that was always really interesting for me.

Win Butler

I like to say I had a very varied undergraduate education. I was an English major first, and then at the end of my college career I decided I was interested in urban planning. I became an urban studies major, with a minor in poetry. I don't think I knew what I was looking for in my early twenties, but I know I kept not finding it.

Ayana Mathis

If there are questions then, of course, there are answers, but the final answer makes the questions seem absurd.

John Cage

Quite early on, and certainly since I started writing, I found that philosophical questions occupied me more than any other kind. I hadn't really thought of them as being philosophical questions, but one rapidly comes to an understanding that philosophy's only really about two questions: 'What is true?' and 'What is good?'

Tom Stoppard

Those who are concerned with the arts are often asked questions, not always sympathetic ones, about the use or value of what they are doing. It is probably impossible to answer such questions directly, or at any rate to answer the people who ask them.

Northrop Frye

As human beings, don't we need questions without answers as well as questions with answers, questions that we might someday answer and questions that we can never answer?

Alan Lightman

I think if you're forthright and answer a lot of questions, sometimes you'll get people who won't let you answer the questions, and that makes for a difficult answer.

Rand Paul

Philosophical questions and modes of thought just seem natural to me. They mesh with the way my mind works.

Samuel Scheffler

If we do get a quantum theory of spacetime, it should answer some of the deepest philosophical questions that we have, like what happened before the big bang?

Michio Kaku

I was being groomed as an undergraduate to specialize in Midwestern prehistory, but going back to my teenage days, my interest has always been in our early human ancestors. I wanted to work in Africa.

Donald Johanson

I don't want to make a comfortable film. I'm not interested in that. I'm not interested in answering people's questions; I'm interested in posing questions. I'm interested in sparking a conversation between two people about what something means. That's enough for me, as a writer and as a director.

Sam Levinson

Writers always sound insufferably smug when they sit back and assert that their job is only to ask questions and not to answer them. But, in good part, it is true. And once you become committed to one particular answer, your freedom to ask new questions is seriously impaired.

David Hare

Science will always raise philosophical questions like, is any scientific theory or model correct? How do we know? Are unobserved things real? etc. and it seems to me of great importance that these questions are not just left to scientists, but that there are thinkers who make it their business to think as clearly and slowly about these questions as it is possible to. Great scientists do not always make the best philosophers.