Andrew Mayne > Quotes

“There’s a clarity that arrives when life forces you into a binary situation.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

“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

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

“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

“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

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

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

“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

“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

“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

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

“When you’re a kid, you just assume your parents were always grown-up. It’s weird—I’m older now than she was when she died. Yet she still feels like my mom.”
― Andrew Mayne, The Naturalist

“Deep down we’re all animals.”
― Andrew Mayne, The Naturalist

“Nuclear is hard. A private individual could still pull it off, if they had enough resources.” “Really? Everyone I’ve talked to says you’d have to be a nation-state, and then we’d still know something was up.” “I think Bill Gates or Elon Musk could pull it off,” replies Theo. “Disguise it in plain sight as fusion research. The key would be keeping a lid on the people working for you. But you could have a hundred physicists and engineers working on compartmentalized projects while only a small team really knows what’s going on.”
― Andrew Mayne, Mastermind

“If you're Stephen King and you realized halfway through you've created far too many plot lines; you arbitrarily murder a few in the middle of the book. If you're George RR Martin; well, you just keep writing more books and murder them at your leisure.”
― Andrew Mayne, How to Write a Novella in 24 Hours: And other questionable & possibly insane advice on creativity for writers

“Data centers are often located where power is the cheapest. If you ever look on satellite images, you’ll find them in some surprising locations. And some of them aren’t exactly public. There are a number of companies that run shadow colocation facilities in case of disasters or attacks,”
― Andrew Mayne, Mastermind

“They give you the chance to tell small lies so they can see how you handle the bigger ones. There’s a reason lawyers tell you to shut up when a cop talks to you. If you’re lucky, that’s the first and last time a cop ever”
― Andrew Mayne, Looking Glass

“She wanted to be like you.” Be like me? A socially ignorant bystander to the world?”
― Andrew Mayne, The Naturalist

“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

“The machines won, sister. We’re just in denial.”
― Andrew Mayne, Murder Theory

“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

“If you want to do real damage, you don’t just break a thing, you destroy a system.”
― Andrew Mayne, Mastermind