Andrew Mayne > Quotes

“There’s a clarity that arrives when life forces you into a binary situation.”
― Andrew Mayne, The Naturalist

“Killing is a solution to a problem. Murder is something you do because you want to. You divorce your wife because you don’t love her. You murder her because you hate her.”
― Andrew Mayne, The Naturalist

“The next time you get into a political discussion, stop and ask yourself what amount of evidence would change your mind. If the answer is none, then realize you’re actually in a religious discussion, one more zealot arguing with another.”
― Andrew Mayne, Looking Glass

“It’s one thing to kill someone and not leave evidence or hide the body so it’s never found, but to be able to murder someone and have everyone think it was an accident of nature? That’s some kind of genius.”
― Andrew Mayne, The Naturalist

“Don't overthink it. Just write.”
― Andrew Mayne, How to Write a Novella in 24 Hours: And other questionable & possibly insane advice on creativity for writers

“Sometimes you don’t get to choose your struggles—they choose you.”
― Andrew Mayne, The Girl Beneath the Sea

“A mistake we make too often in science is thinking that having a name for something is the same as understanding it. A skeleton in a museum or a drop of blood”
― Andrew Mayne, The Naturalist

“When no amount of evidence can convince you that your worldview might be inaccurate, then we’ve exited the realm of reason and entered religious territory. This is why I laugh at the notion of reconciling faith and science. Science is based on the premise that logic and reason can tell us the true nature of reality. Religion is based on the idea that when logic and reason don’t support a predetermined view of reality, they are at fault.”
― Andrew Mayne, Looking Glass

“A scientific man ought to have no wishes, no affections, a mere heart of stone. —Charles Darwin”
― Andrew Mayne, The Naturalist

“In biology you become accustomed to different ways data can represent itself. Salmon returning upstream and herd animals have very linear patterns. Birds follow loops. I’m looking at another pattern. One that’s very familiar to me. It’s a predator’s circuit. I furiously type away, searching for the pattern imprinted on my memory. I find it. It’s not the same shape, but it has similar symmetry. I could write a formula for a fractal that would generate patterns just like these. But it’s not just a pattern, it’s a behavior. The behavior generating the pattern on my wall,”
― Andrew Mayne, The Naturalist

“We have our version. We even tell ourselves convincing little fictions that it’s okay to hate those other people because they’re the ones who are really filled with hate. We make ourselves judges.”
― Andrew Mayne, Mastermind

“know for a fact that if we did as many drug searches of rich white schools as we do poor black ones, there’d be an outcry about our “lack of discretion.” It’s tricky on both sides.”
― Andrew Mayne, The Girl Beneath the Sea

“Besides the emotional difficulty of literally defacing another human being, I become aware of the practical problem.”
― Andrew Mayne, The Naturalist

“You have a judgmental face.” “I’m a scientist. I look at everything this way.”
― Andrew Mayne, The Naturalist

“Sharks have millions of years of preprogrammed strategies. Dolphins have cheat codes.”
― Andrew Mayne, The Naturalist

“Dwelling on the sins of the past won't help us stop the evils of the present.”
― Andrew Mayne, Name of the Devil

“As my hero Richard Feynman would say, “It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is; it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.”
― Andrew Mayne, Looking Glass

“A story isn't what happens. It's how it happens.”
― Andrew Mayne, How to Write a Novella in 24 Hours: And other questionable & possibly insane advice on creativity for writers

“Roosevelt pulled a cigar from his pocket and lit it. “How can you smoke at a time like this?” asked the captain. His eyes were aimed up at the falling flames.

“Hell, if I’m going to die, it’s going to be doing something I enjoy. And since none of you are of the female persuasion, it’s the cigar.”

“At this point the fall would probably just pulverize our legs. If we could avoid cardiac arrest, we’d live. As invalids of course,” replied Smith.

“Don’t ruin my cigar, Schmitty.”
― Andrew Mayne, The Martian Emperor

“The problem is that monsters rarely see themselves that way.”
― Andrew Mayne, Mastermind

“If you were to ask me what’s broken in this world, I’d say it’s the amount of talent found in the places we ignore.”
― Andrew Mayne, Mastermind

“You only see what you’re paying attention to. You’re likely to trail bear tracks all the way back to the bear.”
― Andrew Mayne, The Naturalist

“The real danger isn’t what the Atlantic articles or the New York Times editorials would have you believe: that good guys become bad guys. The real danger is that the good guys will blindly keep doing bad things that they don’t see as bad. It’s why people who would give the shirt off their back to help the poor and the hungry will then march against genetically modified food, even if such food products could save millions of children from blindness or starvation. It’s when people who want democracy in the Middle East find themselves building military bases instead of schools and hospitals.”
― Andrew Mayne, Looking Glass

“He doesn’t realize that brilliance is a kind of binary thing. You either got it or you don’t. If you do, a 130 IQ and a 170 aren’t that different, so long as you know how to apply what you got. Richard Feynman, my personal hero and one of the greatest physicists who ever lived, scored a 128 on his army IQ test. That wouldn’t have gotten him into Mensa. Meanwhile, the guy with the highest IQ on record is a bouncer at a nightclub and spends his free time reading fantasy novels. Tell me that guy is smarter than the man who corrected Stephen Hawking’s science papers.”
― Andrew Mayne, Looking Glass

“Scanning through the bar graphs and readouts of the first DNA sequence e-mailed to me from the lab, I can see the messy, haphazard collection of instructions that make up a human life. While some would argue that the fact that this almost random pattern is proof of a miracle, I’d point out that by that logic, every living thing that manages to be born is a miracle—and if we’re all miracles, then nobody is, because the word has lost its meaning. Life works or it doesn’t.”
― Andrew Mayne, Looking Glass

“Being the first to file, make requisitions, and tell the chain of command what you’re doing is basically the Hogwarts magic of the FBI. If I say that I brought a person of interest in to interview and I ask a supervisor what questions they want answered, it basically commits them to approving the whole endeavor.”
― Andrew Mayne, Mastermind

“Cardiff thinks I’m tied up with them? I’ve half a mind to tell him to go fuck himself right now. Fortunately, the rational side of my brain keeps me from going all McPherson on him. I take a slow breath and put the regulator back in my mouth as I slip under the waves”
― Andrew Mayne, The Girl Beneath the Sea

“A creative mind is always on (unless it's not).”
― Andrew Mayne, How to Write a Novella in 24 Hours: And other questionable & possibly insane advice on creativity for writers

“Science isn’t a book of explanations. It’s a process. A process we’re continuing to refine and make more precise. Despite setbacks and wrong turns, nobody has ever seriously said the problem with science was its demand for more precision and deeper understanding.”
― Andrew Mayne, The Final Equinox

“DNA wasn’t a simple recipe book that could be readily understood.”
― Andrew Mayne, Looking Glass