…I didn’t do anything that can properly be called research; rather, I proceeded by the methodless method of “determined browsing”— – Rudolf Flesch, on collecting excerpts for The Book of Unusual Quotations, 1957

An inveterate quote plucker is what I have become. – Elaine Bernstein Partnow, preface to The Quotable Woman: From Eve to 1799, 1985

In a world in which men write thousands of books and one million scientific papers a year, the mythic bricoleur is the man who plays with all that information and hears a music inside the noise. – William Irwin Thompson