Americans don't have saner gun laws because most Americans, including those citizens who puzzle over better angels, don't want saner gun laws.

Growing up in Delhi, India, I did puzzles, explored numbers, and searched for patterns in everyday settings long before I ever saw an equation.

I feel more like a father to a child: my Cube inspired thousands of 'twisty puzzles,' and I'm amazed how it continues to excite new generations.

Yeah, I could go rock on the back porch and do crossword puzzles - but I've got six kids, ages 9 to 16, and someone in the family should work. That's me.

Most crime fiction plots are not ambitious enough for me. I want something really labyrinthine with clues and puzzles that will reward careful attention.

Crossword puzzles, Sudoku... I'm good at all those things. It's not daily, but I'll do stuff on the airplane. I love playing chess. It's my favorite game.

Age puzzles me. I thought it was a quiet time. My seventies were interesting and fairly serene, but my eighties are passionate. I grow more intense as I age.

I think these days an SF connection would be a boost to other books; I'm sure more people have read my two little detective puzzles because of the SF connection.

It's the boredom that kills you. You read until you're tired of that. You do crossword puzzles until you're tired of that. This is torture. This is mental torture.

I have always been a fixer. I am a fixer. I like problems, and I like puzzles, and I like to help people, so I have been a fixer, and I have always been an educator.

You can involve yourself in electronics, computers, puzzles... there's a lot of creativity and brain working. There's a lot to model trains that people don't realize.

An adventure game is nothing more than a good story set with engaging puzzles that fit seamlessly in with the story and the characters, and looks and sounds beautiful.

Every time you try to create an experience with a character who doesn't use a gun, doesn't drive a car, doesn't jump off platforms, doesn't solve puzzles, you are taking a risk.

It puzzles me when writers say they can't read fiction when they're writing fiction because they don't want to be influenced. I'm totally open to useful influence. I'm praying for it.

Puzzles are always a difficult thing, I don't think I've played any games where the puzzles are perfectly contextualised, unless the entire game is a puzzle game built upon that concept.

Whatever the medium, there is the difficulty, challenge, fascination and often productive clumsiness of learning a new method: the wonderful puzzles and problems of translating with new materials.

There are only three great puzzles in the world, the puzzle of love, the puzzle of death, and, between each of these and part of both of them, the puzzle of God. God is the greatest puzzle of all.

To me, families are puzzles that take a lifetime to work out - or not, as often is the case - and I like to explore how people within them try to connect, be it through love, duty, or circumstance.

Looking back, it puzzles me that my parents decided to stay in Shanghai when they must have known that war was imminent. But the cotton works were my father's responsibility, and duty then counted for something.

To me, Alan Turing was a mystery - it was sort of like something I needed to unravel. And he was also obsessed with puzzles. So I wanted to make the movie like a mystery, like a puzzle that you're piecing together.

I think when I started to write 'The Mysterious Benedict Society' that I had that kind of thing in mind - the notion of having to be able to solve puzzles and riddles because enormous stakes rode upon your ability to do that.

It was used for decades to describe talented computer enthusiasts, people whose skill at using computers to solve technical problems and puzzles was - and is - respected and admired by others possessing similar technical skills.

I was a keen observer and listener. I picked up on clues. I figured things out logically, and I enjoyed puzzles. I loved the clear, focused feeling that came when I concentrated on solving a problem and everything else faded out.

If I wasn't a writer, I would probably be a watchmaker. I like putting puzzles together, and that is what a watch is, figuring out how all the gears and everything else works together. I'm patient and good at focusing on a single task.

Under normal conditions the research scientist is not an innovator but a solver of puzzles, and the puzzles upon which he concentrates are just those which he believes can be both stated and solved within the existing scientific tradition.

If your job all day is disallowing insurance claims, you can still spend an evening playing games with your friends, and you can be faced with threats and puzzles that are far more exciting than anything you've ever imagined facing at work.

My ideal beach house has bookshelves full of paperbacks that can tolerate a little sand, a DVD library that includes some Disney classics for the little ones, board games, and jigsaw puzzles. At least one big flatscreen television is a must.

My mother was born in June and later, feeling a vacancy, chose her birth month for her middle name. Marry to marry, had kids because that's what was done. Liked crossword puzzles, liked lilac trees, liked baking in the sun, and liked Bing Crosby.

What puzzles me is the way that some of the smaller, unknown chateaux imagine that because Chinese millionaires pay ludicrous sums for the great names, they can overcharge for their own inferior fluids. There is no trickledown effect in wine prices.

When I was a college student and I got interested in linguistics the concern among students was, this is a lot of fun, but after we have done a structural analysis of every language in the world what's left? It was assumed there were basically no puzzles.

As for me, I want to have fun while I'm working. Now not everyone thinks physics is fun, but I do. I think experimental physics is especially fun, because not only do you get to solve puzzles about the universe or on Earth, there are really cool toys in the lab.

I'm not a great student, so I don't know that I would have been a great detective. Part of my brain sort of works that way, like wanting to figure out puzzles and figure out what happened and why people do the things they do and who they are and how it happened.

I think, as a choreographer and an action designer, you're constantly giving your characters problems to overcome. That's what makes it fun for choreography. But it also makes it fun for the audience to see them solve those puzzles and how they are as a human being.

Why are cancer patients so hard to buy for? This question always puzzles me. When people are healthy, things are so simple, including gift buying. A jaunt to the local mall or a day in front of the TV watching QVC can be just enough for all the loved ones on your list.

Why are people afraid of ghosts? 'Ooh, no, I wouldn't want to see one! I'd be too scared' - accompanied by a tremolo of fear in the voice - is the common reaction. This puzzles me. I'd think anyone would welcome he opportunity. I've never heard of a ghost hurting anybody.

When I was a kid, what captivated me about detective fiction were the puzzles more than the detectives or their enemies. And as I've gotten older, I see a lot of merit in setting your investigative sights higher than figuring out how someone stole Encyclopedia Brown's bicycle.

Film scores are complicated puzzles that you need to figure out and solve very quickly, or else you're basically fired. You're hired to enhance the film and you only have a couple tries to prove that you are capable of that task. I can keep trying to enhance my album ad infinitum.

I don't really understand why everybody doesn't want to direct. It's an absolutely fascinating combination of skills required and puzzles set on every possible level, emotional and practical and technical. It calls upon such a wide variety of skills. I find it completely absorbing.

In San Francisco, I found Warren Levinson, who had set up a program to study Rous Sarcoma Virus, an archetype for what we now call retroviruses. At the time, the replication of retroviruses was one of the great puzzles of animal virology. Levinson, Levintow and I joined forces in the hope of solving that puzzle.

I am interested in a lot of things - not just show business and my passion for animals. I try to keep current in what's going on in the world. I do mental exercises. I don't have any trouble memorizing lines because of the crossword puzzles I do every day to keep my mind a little limber. I don't sit and vegetate.

I find it very strange when people say that they are trying to solve 'Uncle Vanya' or find a solution for 'Henry V.' Plays aren't puzzles. They are about playing. But so much theatre has become about performing and acting rather than playing, which is a great pity because audiences are captivated by watching people play.

Directing is the best job going. I don't understand why everybody doesn't want to direct. It's an absolutely fascinating combination of skills required and puzzles set on every level - emotional and practical and technical. It calls up on such a wide variety of skills. I find it completely absorbing. I just love the whole process.

It's very clear that global climate change is occurring on earth, but it's also been very clear that that has always happened on earth. We've always had a changing climate on earth. We all know about ice ages. We know when our continent was covered with ice sheets. We know glaciers come and they go. It puzzles me that people forget that.

Don't spend more than you take in. Control your debt. Empower the private sector. We have 50 states out there that are laboratories of democracy. Why are we not empowering the states to find solutions to our problems, particularly health care, as opposed to looking to a one-size-fits-all solution from Washington, D.C.? That puzzles even me.

I love drafting like I love eating ice cream or having sex; I love revising like I love doing logic puzzles; I love line-editing like I love perfectly organizing a bookshelf; I hate reviewing copyedits and the second round of proofreading because, by then, I'm getting pretty tired of my own words. They all have their own challenges, though.

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