#wi

First she would try to kill him, but failing this give him food and her body, breast-feed him back to a state of childishness and even, perhaps, feel affection for him. Then, the moment he was asleep, cut his throat. The synopsis of the ideal marriage. ↗

— J.G. Ballard

#husband #j-g-ballard #james-graham-ballard #jg-ballard #marriage

My wife is my first audience. She's a tough lady, so I can't say that I ever scare her. Except, of course, when she sees me the way I look before breakfast. ↗

— Dean Koontz

#before #breakfast #course #ever #except

Every book has some real life in it. I was never pursued by an evil twin clone, but everything else in MR. MURDER was pretty much out of my own life. ↗

— Dean Koontz

#clone #else #every #everything #evil

I never discuss a novel while I'm writing it, for fear that talking about it will diminish my desire to write it. ↗

— Dean Koontz

#desire #diminish #discuss #fear #i

I receive about 10,000 letters a year from readers, and in the first year after a book is published, perhaps 5,000 letters will deal specifically with that piece of work. ↗

— Dean Koontz

#after #book #deal #first #i

One of the things I like enormously about Bob Weinstein is that that he's the only studio head I have ever known who will change his mind and say he was wrong. ↗

— Dean Koontz

#bob #change #enormously #ever #head

Readers will stay with an author, no matter what the variations in style and genre, as long as they get that sense of story, of character, of empathetic involvement. ↗

— Dean Koontz

#character #empathetic #genre #get #involvement

What I took back, because of my exposure to the Jewish music of the 30s and the 40s in my upbringing with my father, was that kind of theatrical songwriting. It was always a part of my character. This desire to make people laugh. ↗

— Pete Townshend

#back #because #character #desire #exposure

I recently asked more than seventy eminent researchers if they would have done I their work differently if they had thought Darwin's theory was wrong. The responses were all the same: no. I also examined the outstanding biodiscoveries of the past century: the discovery of the double helix; the characterization of the ribosome: the mapping of genomes; research on medications and drug reactions: improvements in food production and sanitation; the development of new surgeries; and others. I even queried biologists working in areas where one would expect the Darwinian paradigm to have most benefited research, such as the emergence of resistance to antibiotics and pesticides. Here, as elsewhere, I found that Darwin's theory had provided no discernible guidance, but was brought in, after the breakthroughs, as an interesting narrative gloss. ↗

— Philip S. Skell

#darwin #darwinism #evolution #macro-evolution #macroevolution

Some of the most memorable, and least regrettable, nights of my own youth were spent in coon hunting with farmers. There is no denying that these activities contributed to the economy of farm households, but a further fact is that they were pleasures; they were wilderness pleasures, not greatly different from the pleasures pursued by conservationists and wilderness lovers. As I was always aware, my friends the coon hunters were not motivated just by the wish to tree coons and listen to hounds and listen to each other, all of which were sufficiently attractive; they were coon hunters also because they wanted to be afoot in the woods at night. Most of the farmers I have known, and certainly the most interesting ones, have had the capacity to ramble about outdoors for the mere happiness of it, alert to the doings of the creatures, amused by the sight of a fox catching grasshoppers, or by the puzzle of wild tracks in the snow. ↗

— Wendell Berry

#happiness #hunting #leisure #wilderness #food