A Quote by Vivian Gornick

a scientist or a writer is one who ruminates continuously on the nature of physical or imaginative life, experiences repeated relief and excitement when the insight comes, and is endlessly attracted to working out the idea.

Vivian Gornick

Quote Topics

Attracted Continuously Endlessly Excitement Experiences Idea Imaginative Insight Life Nature Out Physical Relief Repeated Scientist Working Writer

Quote Author

Vivian Gornick
American - Critic
Born: June 14, 1935

When you decide 'to be a writer,' you don't have the faintest idea of what the work is like. When you begin, you write spontaneously out of your limited experience of both the unwritten world and the written world. You're full of naïve exuberance. 'I am a writer!' Rather like the excitement of 'I have a lover!' But working at it nearly every day for fifty years ? whether it is being the writer or being the lover ? turns out to be an extremely taxing job and hardly the pleasantest of human activities.

Philip Roth

But I think there are a set of experiences that turn a potential writer into a working writer, and then there are places in your life were you start to recognize what you want to do.

Stephen King

Simplicity is a pleasant thing in children, or at any age, but it is not necessarily admirable, nor is affectation altogether a thing of evil. To be normal, to be at home in the world, with a prospect of power, usefulness, or success, the person must have that imaginative insight into other minds that underlies tact and savoir-faire, morality and beneficence. This insight involves sophistication, some understanding and sharing of the clandestine impulses of human nature. A simplicity that is merely the lack of this insight indicates a sort of defect.

Charles Horton Cooley

People take it for granted that the physical world is both ordered and intelligible. The underlying order in nature - the laws of physics - are simply accepted as given, as brute facts. Nobody asks where they came from; at least not in polite company. However, even the most atheistic scientist accepts as an act of faith that the universe is not absurd, that there is a rational basis to physical existence manifested as law-like order in nature that is at least partly comprehensible to us. So science can proceed only if the scientist adopts an essentially theological worldview.

Paul Davies

Relief. Excitement and relief. Relief is definitely the key word.

Gerry Dee

When I was growing up, I had no idea that I could possibly become a writer. I wrote endlessly in journals - a practice I maintained for a long time, well into the writing life I had no idea I could ever have.

Dani Shapiro

Every suggested idea produces a corresponding physical reaction. Every idea constantly repeated ends by being engraved upon the brain, provoking the act which corresponds to that idea.

Scott Reed

It's a little bit like talking about the life of writing. The life of writing may be about many things, but it always begins with the writer. With the kernel of an idea, or a character, or an idea or a theme, or even an outcome. But for documentary photographers, photographs begin at that intersection of the real world and the imaginative inner world.

Sam Abell

Science is a field which grows continuously with ever expanding frontiers. Further, it is truly international in scope. Science is a collaborative effort. The combined results of several people working together is often much more effective than could be that of an individual scientist working alone.

John Bardeen

I find it endlessly interesting, endlessly funny, the fact that we're rather arbitrarily divided up into these discrete humans and that your physical self, your physical attributes, your moment of history and the place where you were born determine who you are as much as all that indefinable stuff that's inside of you.

Deborah Eisenberg

My father was the editor of an agricultural magazine called 'The Southern Planter.' He didn't think of himself as a writer. He was a scientist, an agronomist, but I thought of him as a writer because I'd seen him working at his desk. I just assumed that I was going to do that, that I was going to be a writer.

Tom Wolfe

At the time, I didn't have the insight to wonder at the transient nature of despair, but now that I'm older I've seen how little it takes to turn a person's life around for better or worse. An event will do, or an Idea. Another person. An idea of a person.

Meg Rosoff

You've got to pay attention to what you're attracted to because as you hold images of what you want, you're gonna be attracted to things that are going to be attracted to you, but it literally moves into physical reality with and through you and it does that by law.

Bob Proctor

All of the physical universes put together, stretching out endlessly, are only a fraction of the totality of reality. In other words, all of the physical universes are only part of the physical dimensional plane, and there are thousands of dimensional planes.

Frederick Lenz

The spirit of humanity, like the forces of nature, and like the physical life, is at bottom energy.... Spiritual life, therefore, is just as much a development out of what has gone before in the evolutionary process as physical life is; which means that the origin of spiritual life is from within.