It may be in the cultural particularities of people — in their oddities — that some of the most instructive revelations of what it is to be generically human are to be found.

I have a social philosophy; you have political opinions; he has an ideology.

The way in which mathematicians and physicists and historians talk is quite different, and what a physicist means by physical intuition and what a mathematician means by beauty or elegance are things worth thinking about.

I was trained in the '50s as a New Critic. I remember what literature was like before the New Critics, when people stood up and talked about Shelley's soul and such things

I'm an inveterate fox and not a hedgehog, so I always think you should try everything

We don't know what we think until we see what we say.

I've written a lot of books which are written from the moon - the view from nowhere.