Benoit Mandelbrot

Well, Italy had been overrun by the War, there had practically been civil war, north and south of the Gothic Line, heavy bombing, the northern industrial cities had been bombed heavily and we had political disorder before 1948.

I went into academia thinking that there'd be constant reciprocity between my scholarship and my creative work but found that doing one always turned my mind into the sort of tool that was badly suited to doing the other.