Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
God is the nest we build together.
People don't want other people to be people.
What a man knows hardly matters. It is what he does.
All novels are fantasies. Some are more honest about it.
...I rejoiced in the flaws that made her more real to me
When a gift is deserved, it is not a gift but a payment.
There is no magic. There is only knowledge, more or less hidden.
...in some situations winning consist[s] of disentangling oneself.
Hope is a psychological mechanism unaffected by external realities.
Knowledge is soon changed, then lost in the mist, an echo half-heard.
That we are capable only of being what we are remains our unforgivable sin.
Have a short story feature two situations, and then let them solve each other.
Men are said to desire women, Severian. Why do they despise the women they obtain?
Before you ask more questions, think about whether you really want to know the answers.
Online publication is fine with me, in part because I hope to collect those stories later.
Religion and science have always been matters of faith in something. It is the same something.
You never learn how to write a novel. You just learn how to write the novel that you're writing.
Weak people believe what is forced on them. Strong people what they wish to believe, forcing that to be real.
My definition of good literature is that which can be read by an educated reader, and reread with increased pleasure.
I was trapped in admiration for what I had once admired, as a fly in amber remains the captive of some long-vanished pine.
We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges.
We have treatments for disturbed persons, Nicholas. But, at least for the time being, we have no treatment for disturbing persons.
There is no limit to stupidity. - Space itself is said to be bounded by its own curvature, but stupidity continues beyond infinity.
Men to whom wine had brought death long before lay by springs of wine and drank still, too stupefied to know their lives were past.
There's a certain kind of lonely man who rejects love, because he believes that anyone who offers it wouldn't be a lover worth having.
So powerful is the charm of words, which for us reduces to manageable entities all the passions that would otherwise madden and destroy us.
Do not start a story unless you have an ending in mind. You can change the story's ending if you wish, but you should always have a destination.
You seem to think that the only genuine existence evil can have is conscious existence - that no one is evil unless he admits it to himself. I disagree.
Evolution teaches us the original purpose of language was to ritualize men's threats and curses, his spells to compel the gods; communication came later.
He's not rewarding us by talking to us. He's talking to us because He has something to say to us directly, as opposed to the things He says to all humanity.
All of us... when we think we are talking most intimately to someone else, are actually addressing an image we have of the person to whom we believe we speak.
A youthful American voice isn't particularly challenging - I've been a young American, and they're all around me. I can walk from my house to Barrington High School.
All time exists. That is the truth.... If the future did not exist now, how could we journey toward it? If the past does not exist still, how could we leave it behind?
Ambiguity is necessary in some of my stories, not in all. In those, it certainly contributes to the richness of the story. I doubt that thematic closure is never attainable.
You do not characterize by telling the reader about the character. You do it by showing the character thinking, speaking and acting in a characteristic way. You simply show it and shut up.
Science has so accustomed us to devising and accepting theories to account for the facts we observe, however fantastic, that our minds must begin their manufacture before we are aware of it.
Imagine a man who stands before a mirror; a stone strikes it, and it falls to ruin all in an instant. And the man learns that he is himself, and not the mirrored man he had believed himself to be.
I don't think anyone is more intrinsically holy. People experience God in many ways; and it seems to me that God does what the rest of us do: He chooses the means that best gets His message across.
Year followed struggling year for me, and all that time I read - I suppose few have ever read so. I began, as most young people do, by reading the books I enjoyed. But I found that narrowed my pleasure.
Whether the medium is ready for consumers is better judged by those consumers. I sometimes read online - but not often. The stigma is attached to pay scales. Much online publication is no pay or small pay.
You're a materialist, like all ignorant people. But your materialism doesn't make materialism true. Don't you know that? In the final summing up, it is spirit and dream, thought and love and act that matter.
Some writers say they cannot write in front of a window; many say they cannot function without almost perfect quiet. A writer with only two hours a day can write in the back of an open truck on the Interstate.
I have read only the first 'Harry Potter' book. I thought it excellent, perhaps the best thing written for older children since The Hobbit. I wish the books had been around when my kids were the right age for them.
A child, not knowing what is extraordinary and what is commonplace, usually lights midway between the two, finds interest in incidents adults consider beneath notice, and calmly accepts the most improbable occurrences.
We think that we know a man or a woman, when so much of what we know is actually that man's or that woman's situation, his or her place on the board of life. Move the pawn to the last row and see her rise in armor, sword in hand.
I could speculate, but it would be just speculation and the kind of thing that you would get in with a science fiction story. And if I was doing a science fiction story then I would come up with what can go wrong with this system.
We only have one dog now. Calamity Jane had to be put down. She was very old, and her medicine no longer controlled her seizures. Dilly is five now, I think. He's a neutered American Pit Bull Terrier, very gentle, about the color of buckskin.
My whole life experience feeds into my writing. I think that must be true for every writer. Clearly the Army and combat were major influences; just the same, you need to understand that many of the writers we have now couldn't load a revolver.
That was when I found out that the best way in the world to make yourself feel better when you have hit bottom is to try to get somebody else to feel better. There are certain things in life that are truly worth knowing, and that is one of the big ones.
Then I could not help wondering what the watching gods thought of us, with our clever masks and our jokes. What we think of crickets, perhaps, whose singing we hear with pleasure, though some of us smash them with our heels when they venture into sight.