Literature often gets taught nowadays as a record of the sins and shortcomings of the past. I see literature and the arts very differently: as essential to being human and to human progress, individual and collective. — Brian Boyd Copy Share Image
Literature and the other arts play with pattern - our brains understand our world by recognizing patterns - and with possibility. The arts harness our sharpest senses, sight and sound, and our richest ways of understanding, in language and narrative.… — Brian Boyd Copy Share Image
Popper and Nabokov are very different people in some ways - and I'm ready to devote large chunks of my life to both of… — Brian Boyd Copy Share Image
Any artist who really engages with the problems in their medium at that moment and tries to deepen the problems is likely to discover… — Brian Boyd Copy Share Image
Perhaps the most demanding trick in all of art is to know ways that are going to capture the attention of an audience right… — Brian Boyd Copy Share Image
There's a young Danish guy who has done a lot of work from an evolutionary perspective, Mathias Clasen. Basically, his argument is we've evolved… — Brian Boyd Copy Share Image
I think that's an important part of art in general. Especially in literature, in stories, we play with eventualities that may put us through… — Brian Boyd Copy Share Image
Everything is humanities. The sciences are a form of the humanities. They involve traditions of inquiry; they involve social engagement with ideas. They do… — Brian Boyd Copy Share Image
Scientists, to give them credit, do not think of the humanities in a negative way. It's the bureaucrats who want to cut costs who… — Brian Boyd Copy Share Image
“Writing of Pushkin, Nabokov once observed quite accurately that his subject was the threefold formula of human life: the irretrievability of the past, the… — Brian Boyd Copy Share Image
I would be very surprised if on another planet we discovered a species as intelligent as humans that didn't have narrative, or didn't have… — Brian Boyd Copy Share Image
There is behavioral ecology, which looks closely at the difference different ecologies make to behavior and other features of animals and humans. There's evolutionary… — Brian Boyd Copy Share Image
It seems to me to make as much sense to talk about literature as a large-scale human phenomenon without bringing in evolution as it… — Brian Boyd Copy Share Image
If an artwork never gets any attention from anybody, then obviously it's got problems. If it gains attention from a very small elite, then… — Brian Boyd Copy Share Image
