There are several interesting anecdotes related to Dirac. I’ve tried to capture a few of them. **

• Logic and precision Dirac was so unusual in the logic and precision of his interaction with the world, both in and out of physics, that legions of “Dirac stories” have become attached to him and have acquired a life of their own. Often these stories revolve around Dirac saying exactly what he meant and no more. Once when someone, making polite conversation at dinner, commented that it was windy, Dirac left the table and went to the door, looked out, returned to the table and replied that indeed it was windy. It has been said in jest that his spoken vocabulary consisted of “Yes”, “No”, and “I don’t know”.- Dirac on Dostoevski Once Peter Kapitza, the Russian physicist, gave Dirac an English translation of Dostoevski’s Crime and Punishment. “Well, how do you like it?” asked Kapitza when Dirac returned the book. “It is nice,” said Dirac, “but in one of the chapters the author made a mistake. He describes the Sun rising twice on the same day.” This was his one and only comment on Dostoevski’s novel.- Clarity Dirac’s writing was famous for its clarity and simplicity. When Niels Bohr was writing a scientific paper - with many hesitations and redraftings, as was his custom, Bohr stopped: “I do not know how to finish this sentence.” Dirac replied: “I was taught at school that you should never start a sentence without knowing the end of it.” - It’s not a question At the quesiton period after a Dirac lecture at the University of Toronto, somebody in the audience remarked: “Professor Dirac, I do not understand how you derived the formula on the top left side of the blackboard.” “This is not a question,” snapped Dirac, “it is a statement. Next question, please.”

The question we writers are asked most often, the favorite question, is: Why do you write? I write because I have an innate need to write. I write because I can’t do normal work as other people do. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I can partake of real life only by changing it. I write because I want others, the whole world, to know what sort of life we lived, and continue to live, in Istanbul, in Turkey. I write because I love the smell of paper, pen, and ink. I write because I believe in literature, in the art of the novel, more than I believe in anything else. I write because it is a habit, a passion. I write because I am afraid of being forgotten. I write because I like the glory and interest that writing brings. I write to be alone. Perhaps I write because I hope to understand why I am so very, very angry at everyone. I write because I like to be read. I write because once I have begun a novel, an essay, a page I want to finish it. I write because everyone expects me to write. I write because I have a childish belief in the immortality of libraries, and in the way my books sit on the shelf. I write because it is exciting to turn all life’s beauties and riches into words. I write not to tell a story but to compose a story. I write because I wish to escape from the foreboding that there is a place I must go but—as in a dream—can’t quite get to. I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy. ~ “My Father’s Suitcase”, Nobel Prize for Literature lecture, December 7, 2006

I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.~Speech at the Nobel Prize Banquet after receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature (10 December 1950) by Faulkner

~http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2007/lessing-lecture_en.html