Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Doing a life study while drunk and in the process of being seduced is never a formula for quality art.
If there is a true religion in the universe, it must include the truth of contact or be forever hollow.
It no longer matters who consider themselves the masters of events. Events no longer obey their masters.
But I think, and hope, that the novels can be understood and enjoyed as science fiction, on their own terms.
The sum of the crowd's IQ was far below that of its most modest single member. Mobs have passions, not brains.
Prison always has been a good place for writers, killing, as it does, the twin demons of mobility and diversion
This is every writer's nightmare - the sudden breakdown of meaning in the language that sustains and supports us.
Fate and victory shift ... now this way, now that way -- like a line of unarmored men under a hail of enemy arrows.
You treat violence as an aberration ... when in truth it is the norm. It is the very essence of the human condition.
Seduction... was both a science and art - a blend of skill, discipline, proximity, and opportunity. Mostly proximity.
If everyone could understand the working of a psychopath's mind, we undoubtedly would be closer to insanity ourselves.
The love of violence is an aspect of our humanity. Even the weak wish to be strong primarily so they can wield the whip.
Words were like objects, making the idea more solid -- less a poisonous gas and more a ... cube of crystallized thought.
The Great Change is when humankind accepts its role as part of the natural order of the universe instead of its role as a cancer
The past is dead and buried. But I know now that buried things have a way of rising to the surface when one least expects them to.
We are not the only avatars of humanity. Once our computing machines achieved self-consciousness, they became part of this design.
The Victorians, they were like the Germans in World War II. They could not stop recording details about their lives and their age.
A token of ecological awareness in a society devoted to self destruction and waste but unwilling to acknowledge its indulgent ways.
The young remember most deeply.... When we are old and failing, it is the memories of childhood which can be summoned most clearly.
Religion seems to have always offered us that false duality ... the silences of infinite space or the cozy comfort of inner certainty.
Mystery. The strangeness of place so necessary to some creative spirits. A perfect mixture of the classical utopia and the pagan mystery.
It's one of the strangest attributes of this profession that when we writers get exhausted writing one thing, we relax by writing another.
Any allegiance to a deity or concept or universal principal which put obedience above decent behavior toward an innocent human being evil.
Those who ignore history's lessons in the ultimate folly of war are forced to do more than relive them ... they may be forced to die by them.
A hero. You want to be one of those rare human beings who make history, rather than merely watch it flow around them like water around a rock.
Once evolution gets a good basic design, it tends to throw away the variants and concentrate on the near-infinite diversity within that design.
History viewed from the inside is always a dark, digestive mess, far different from the easily recognizable cow viewed from afar by historians.
Merely to live without a pain Is little gladness, little gain, Ah, welcome joy tho' mixt with grief-- The thorn-set flower that crowns the leaf.
In the end--when all else is dust--loyalty to those we love is all we can carry with us to the grave. Faith--true faith--was trusting in that love.
Movie SF is, by definition, dumbed down - there have only been three or four SF movies in the history of film that aspire to the complexity of literary SF.
Speaking as a novelist myself, I know that members of our profession live in our imaginations as much or more as we inhabit what people call 'the real world.
Writing, Im convinced, should be a subversive activity - frowned on by the authorities - and not one cooed over and praised beyond common sense by some teacher.
Writing, I'm convinced, should be a subversive activity - frowned on by the authorities - and not one cooed over and praised beyond common sense by some teacher.
No lifetime is long enough for those ... who simply wish to understand themselves and their lives. It is, perhaps, the curse of being human, but also a blessing.
Luckily, even as a young man not yet become himself, John Bridgens had two things besides indecision that kept him from self-destruction - books and a sense of irony.
Barbarians, we call them, while all the while we timidly cling to our Web like Visigoths crouching in the ruins of Rome's faded glory and proclaim ourselves civilized.
The future is like smoke from a burning forest, waiting for the wind of specific events and personal courage to blow the sparks and embers of reality this way or that.
Most of us do know we have no immortality. And when you've found a genius, someone who has already purchased his immortality in musical or literary terms, it's maddening.
All violence flows from the same source ... the need for power. Power is the only true morality ... the only deathless god, and the appetite for violence is its only commandment.
War must never be a condition but, rather, a temporary scourge which we suffer as a child does a fever, knowing that health follows the long night of pain and that peace is health.
As long as my sixth graders showed an average improvement of five years, the principal and district pretty much left me alone to create my own curriculum and teach whatever I wanted
Human beings have only that confusing mass of chemically driven neurological storage to rely on. They're all subjective and emotion-tinged. How can they trust any of their memories?
As long as my sixth graders showed an average improvement of five years, the principal and district pretty much left me alone to create my own curriculum and teach whatever I wanted.
Pain is an interesting and off-putting thing. Few if any things in life concentrate our attention so completely and terribly, and few things are more boring to listen to or read about.
There's a unique bond of trust between readers and authors that I don't believe exists in any other art form; as a reader, I trust a novelist to give me his or her best effort, however flawed.
There is a certain solipsism to serious illness which claims all of one's attention as certainly as an astronomical black hole seizes anything unlucky enough to fall within its critical radius.
Each heart has its graveyard, each household its dead, And knells ring around us wherever we tread, And the feet that awhile made our pathway so bright Pass on to a land that is out of our sight.
Every age fraught with discord and danger seems to spawn a leader meant only for that age, a political giant whose absence, in retrospect, seems inconceivable when the history of that age is written.
There is no doubt that I have discovered the ultimate in stagnant human societies. The Bikura have realized the human dream of immortality and have paid for it with their humanity and their immortal souls.
In twentieth-century Old Earth, a fast food chain took dead cow meat, fried it in grease, added carcinogens, wrapped it in petroleum-based foam, and sold nine hundred billion units. Human beings. Go figure.