You get on with your own life. Lettie gave it to you. You just have to grow up and try and be worth it.
Everything here is so weak, little girl. Everything breaks so easily. They want such simple things.
I couldn’t get you to the ocean, but there was nothing stopping me bringing the ocean to you.
She took my hands in her, then, and squeezed them. ‘But you stayed where you were meant to be, and you didn’t listen to them. Well done. That’s quality, that is,’ and she sounded proud. In that moment I forgot my hunger and I forgot my fear.
I wondered how I looked to her, in that place, and knew that even in a place that was nothing but knowledge that was the one thing I could not know. That if I look inward I would see only infinite mirrors staring into myself for eternity.
The future had suddenly become unknowable: anything could happen: the train of my life had jumped the rails and headed off across the fields and coming down the lane with me, then.
Love me when I least deserve it, because that’s when I really need it.
I do not permit affection, or lack thereof, to influence my actions. There is good, and there is evil. The good must be protected; the evil eradicated. I have shown you the triumph of evil, as a caution.
Short stories are tiny windows into other worlds and other minds and other dreams.
On the whole, anything that gets you writing and keeps you writing is a good thing. Anything that stops you writing is a bad thing.
You can tell the date of an old science fiction novel by every word on the page. Nothing dates harder and faster and more strangely than the future.
I believe that mankind’s destiny lies in the stars...
When I was young, I was reading anything and anything I could lay my hands on. I was a veracious-to-the-point-of-insane reader.
When I was 7, my proudest possession would have been my bookshelf ’cause I had alphabetized all of the books on my bookshelf.
You know, it’s weird being interviewed! Because the weird thing about being interviewed is you get asked these questions that you’ve never thought about, and you find out what you think as you answer.
Writers may be solitary but they also tend to flock together: they like being solitary together.
There will always be people who are much better at doing this or doing that, but you are the only you.
I don’t think you get perfect couples. At best you get two people building something, and working at it, and loving each other, and doing their best to communicate.
In Hollywood the man who cleans your pool is an actor. The man who sells you your copy of Variety is an actor. I don’t think there’s a real person left in the place.
There are some dogs which, when you meet them, remind you that, despite thousands of years of manmade evolution, every dog is still only two meals away from being a wolf.