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"What hadn't been realized in the literature until now is that merely to describe how severely something has been tested in the past itself embodies inductive assumptions, even as a statement about the past."
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"This philistinism of interpretation is more rife in literature than in any other art. For decades now, literary critics have understood it to be their task to translate the elements of the poem or play or novel or story into something else. Sometimes a writer will be so uneasy before the naked power of his art that he will install within the work itself - albeit with a little shyness, a touch of the good taste of irony - the clear and explicit interpretation of it. Thomas Mann is an example of such an overcooperative author. In the case of more stubborn authors, the critic is only too happy to perform the job."
"Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination, and of the heart."
"A book is as private and consensual as sex."
"For the narrative to exist, so that it could be read and reread even if I was taken away. Stories outlive their writers all the time. We know plenty about Goethe and Charles Dickens from what they chose to tell, even though they have been dead for years."
"I haven't stuck to any formula. Most great writers stick to the same style, but I wanted to be more various."
"I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature."
"I suppose all fictional characters, especially in adventure or heroic fiction, at the end of the day are our dreams about ourselves. And sometimes they can be really revealing."
"When you think about the period in which Agatha Christie's crime novels were written, they are actually quite edgy for the time."
"Good characters in fiction are the very devil. Not only because most authors have too little material to make them of, but because we as readers have a strong subconscious wish to find them incredible."
Explore more quotes by Robert Nozick
"The fact that we don't keep repeating tests in the same arena is not because the probability of the hypothesis showing its falsity in other arenas goes up after it has passed tests in one arena."
"There is no justifiable prediction about how the hypothesis will hold up in the future; its degree of corroboration simply is a historical statement describing how severely the hypothesis has been tested in the past."
"Through the evolutionary process, those who are able to engage in social cooperation of various sorts do better in survival and reproduction."
"Examples one finds in the philosophical literature are somebody who's seen the trial of a child of theirs, where they're being proved guilty of some crime that would drive the parent into a depression, maybe a suicidal depression."
"It is, from another angle, an attack on requiring proof in philosophy. And it's also the case, I guess, that my temperament is to like interesting, new, bold ideas, and to try and generate them."
"Certainly the emphasis I place in this chapter on coordination of behavior and cooperation to mutual benefit is something that ought to be very congenial to people in the libertarian tradition."
"It's the level that allows us each to live our own chosen lives. But I notice not everyone agrees with the primary importance of that level, and I try to account for how they don't."
"I guess my tendency is to think essentially that the new wrinkles won't do the job if the old major idea didn't, and so you have to try something different. Then maybe they can all be combined in some coherent piece."
"Evolutionary cosmology formulates theories in which a universe is capable of giving rise to and generating future universes out of itself, within black holes or whatever."
"The scientists often have more unfettered imaginations than current philosophers do. Relativity theory came as a complete surprise to philosophers, and so did quantum mechanics, and so did other things."
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