I want the situations and plots to be surprising and…

Innovation has a lot to do with your ability to recognise surprising and unusual phenomena.

— Herbert Simon

The majority of my UFO diet consists of reports describing suspected encounters. This is not surprising, as there are thousands of sightings annually. The…

— Seth Shostak

Science fiction is an amazing literature: plot elements that you would think would be completely worn out by now keep changing into surprising new…

— Connie Willis

The writer must always leave room for the characters to grow and change. If you move your characters from plot point to plot point,…

— Richard North Patterson

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary, O’er a plan to venge myself upon that cursed Thursday Next- This Eyre…

— Jasper Fforde

It is thus hardly surprising that so many of the great minds in recent history have concerned themselves with economic matters. Indeed, they have…

— Paul Zane Pilzer

We could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness - curiosity, adventure, resilience, the capacity for surprising insight simply by being more flexible about time,…

— John Taylor Gatto

It is almost always impossible to evaluate at the time events which you have already experienced, and to understand their meaning with the guidance…

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“Sometimes people rise above their past, sometimes not. And sometimes the people you least expect it from—like Raylan and my father— have a way…

— Kayla Cunningham

Actually,” I said, hesitant to bring it up, “I was thinking along the lines of a curse that can turn you human.” “Or witch?”…

— Kim Harrison

It's surprising to me how many of my friends send Christmas cards, or holiday cards, including my atheist and secular friends.

— Christopher Hitchens

But we must not underestimate the potency of the mathematical process of abstraction. A surprising variety of things happen to have both magnitude and…

— Banesh Hoffmann

End-of-the-world stories tend to ring true. I've always been drawn to them, but as I wrote my own, I found surprising pleasure in creating…

— Karen Thompson Walker

Life, if you live it right, keeps surprising you, and the thing that keeps surprising you the most…is yourself

— William Deresiewicz

It is indeed a surprising and fortunate fact that nature can be expressed by relatively low-order mathematical functions.

— Rudolf Carnap