"Imagine you are doing a woodworking project, perhaps making a table. Fortunately, you needn't make all the parts yourself. Some are standard sizes and shapes - lengths of two by four, for instance - available at any lumberyard. Some have already been designed and made by other people - drawer pulls and turned legs. All you have to do is fit them into the places you left for them, knowing they were available. You want to make an argument instead of a table. You have created some of the argument yourself, perhaps on the basis of new data or information you have collected. But you needn't invent the whole thing. Other people have worked on your problems or problems related to it, and have made some of the pieces you need. You just have to fit them in where they belong. Like the woodworker, you leave space, when you make your portion of the argument, for the other parts you know you can get. You do that, that is, if you know that they are there to use. And that's one good reason to know the literature: so that you will know the pieces are available and not waste time doing what has already been done."

“define the problems of their art similarly and agree on criteria for an acceptable solution. They know the history of previous attempts to solve those problems, or some of it, and the new problems those attempts generated. They know the history of work like theirs, so that they, their support personnel, and their audiences can understand what they have attempted and how and to what degree it works.”

“Good sociology is sociological work that produces meaningful descriptions of organizations and events, valid explanations of how they come about and persist, and realistic proposals for their improvement or removal.”

“The audience is unpredictable, and the people who produce and distribute the artistic work have no real contact with it. They market the work in large quantities as with books and records, or through a mechanical system, as with radio and television, so that they could not, if they tried, know audience members personally.”

“There is no reason to assume that only those who finally commit a deviant act actually have the impulse to do so. It is much more likely that most people experience deviant impulses frequently. At least in fantasy, people are much more deviant than they appear. Instead of asking why deviants want to do things that are disapproved of, we might better ask why conventional people do not follow through on the deviant impulses they have. Something of an answer to this question may be found in the process of commitment through which the “normal” person becomes progressively involved in conventional institutions and behavior.”

“Photographers learn to interpret photographs in that technical way because they want to understand and use that ‘language’ themselves . Social scientists who want to work with visual materials will have to learn to approach them in this more studious and time-consuming way”

“There is little disagreement about what constitutes a healthy state of the organism. But there is much less agreement when one uses the notion of pathology analogically, to describe kinds of behavior that are regarded as deviant. For people do not agree on what constitutes healthy behavior... The medical metaphor limits what we can see much as the statistical view does. It accepts the lay judgment of something as deviant and, by use of analogy, locates its source within the individual, thus preventing us from seeing the judgment itself as a crucial part of the phenomenon.”