Strive for the Long Now.
If you want your fridge-freezer and your car and a nice house and asphalt on the roads and a health service, then thank the weapons business. Thank the war economy that drives us to this.
All of everything came into existence simply because it wanted to be. The big bang wasn’t so much a big bang as a hasty dash toward an opportunity to trade nothingness for somethingness. The main contributory factor to the entire universe was a momentary effect in need of a cause.
Though his death would not fill me with any sense of sadness, I would probably feel the loss. Even enemies are part of one.
Most of Mycroft’s ideas were far too dangerous to even think about, much less let loose on a world unprepared for hyper-radical thought.
Truly competent Literary Detectives are as rare as truthful men, Mr. Tweed – you can see her potential as clearly as I can. Frightened of someone stealing your thunder, perhaps?
I had never come across a talking cat before, but good manners, as my father used to say, cost nothing.
Besides, I punched him in the eye.
Marriage, like spinach and opera, was something I had never thought I would like.
If the real world were a book, it would never find a publisher. Overlong, detailed to the point of distraction-and ultimately, without a major resolution.
If the real world were a book, it would never find a publisher.
Personally I have a great deal of fun doing it, which is an inspiration in itself really. It really allows me to daydream, as in “schooldream” which is daydreaming with ink and get paid for it which is something I don’t say to schools when I go in and talk to them.
I didn’t set out to discover a truth. I was actually sent to the Outer Fringes to conduct a chair census and learn some humility. But the truth inevitably found me, as important truths often do, like a lost thought in need of a mind.
For an author just starting out, you’ve got to deliver the goods every year or sooner or people will forget you or you will lose momentum. There is a contract that exists between author and reader.
Ill-fitting grammar are like ill-fitting shoes. You can get used to it for a bit, but then one day your toes fall off and you can’t walk to the bathroom.
Love is a wonderful thing, my dear, but it leaves you wide open for blackmail.
To a great extent, I still write for myself, write what amuses me. Fortunately, I have a quirky sort of strange sense of humor that appeals to other people and that’s good. I still sort of write for myself though there are some areas of the book I feel I have to put in and I feel I have to deliver.
Cats aren’t really friendly, they’re just cozying up to the dominant life-form as a hedge against extinction.
Don’t let anyone tell you the future is already written. The best any prophet can do is to give you the most likely version of future events. It is up to us to accept the future for what it is, or change it. It is easy to go with the flow; it takes a person of singular courage to go against it.
If only life were that simple; if one could jump to the good parts and flick through the bad –.