Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question.
I do not care what comes after; I have seen the dragons on the wind of morning.
I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.
People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.
How can people be anything but ignorant when knowledge isn't saved, isn't taught?
No matter how intelligent a man is, he can't see what he doesn't know how to see.
I had forgotten how much light there is in the world, till you gave it back to me.
Artists are people who are not at all interested in the facts - only in the truth.
If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.
It was men's ambitions, they said, that had perverted all the arts to ends of gain.
Planets were very large places, on any scale but that of the spaces in between them.
We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.
A writer either speaks to adults and bores kids, or speaks to kids and upsets adults.
The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.
When I'm writing I don't dream much; it's like the dreaming gets used in the writing.
It is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception and compassion and hope.
The historic function of a Senator from Oregon is to drive all the other Senators mad.
A man who saw a miracle would reject his eyes' witness, if those with him saw nothing.
We're each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?
But it doesn't take a thousand men to open a door, my lord." "It might to keep it open.
To know there is a choice is to have to make the choice: change or stay: river or rock.
One of the things [fiction] does is lead you to recognize what you did not know before.
Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art - the art of words.
The question is always the same with a dragon: will he talk with you or will he eat you?
Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it's not poison.
Maybe when you meet the people you are supposed to meet you know it, without knowing it.
Gradually the healing took place, seeming as it always does that it wasn't taking place.
What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing.
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.
You sit down and you do it, and you do it, and you do it, until you have learned to do it.
Writing makes no noise, except groans, and it can be done everywhere, and it is done alone.
It is good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters in the end.
Nothing is yours. It is to use. It is to share. If you will not share it, you cannot use it.
Living, being in the world, was a much greater and stranger thing than she had ever dreamed.
What else can the young be? When you are on the bottom, you must organize from the bottom up
O foolish writer. Now moves. Even in storytime, dreamtime, once-upon-a-time, now isn't then.
Most civilisations, perhaps, look shinier in general terms and from several light-years away.
The reader can't take much for granted in a fiction where the scenery can eat the characters.
When people say, Did you always want to be a writer?, I have to say no! I always WAS a writer.
Art is action. The way I live my life to its highest degree is by writing, the practice of art.
When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.
Is it the gods who set this fire in our hearts, or do we each make our fierce desire into a god?
Other people's stories may become part of your own, the foundation of it, the ground it goes on.
My great-aunt. . . . said nobody under 18 had any business reading Dickens. . . . She was right.
You can go home again...so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.
It's not a weapon or a woman can make a man, or magery either, or any power, anything but himself.
To claim power over what you do not understand is not wise, nor is the end of it likely to be good.
Do you know how to read?" "No. It is one of the black arts." He nodded. "But a useful one," he said.
My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world, and exiles me from it.
A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt.