But knowledge is there, in the meat,” she said, “and I am resolved to learn from it.
Harlan Ellison.
I wanted books and made no distinction between good books or bad, only between the ones I loved, the ones that spoke to my soul, and the ones I merely liked. I did not care how a story was written. There were no bad stories: every story was new and glorious.
The advice of poets is the cordiality of kings.
He tosses the car keys into the air and catches them. Then he puts on the black plastic sunglasses he found in the pockets, and leaves the hotel room to go and look for his cab.
He hoped he would live through this, but he was willing to die, if that was what it took to be alive.
Do not take revenge in the heat of the moment. Instead, wait until the hour is propitious.
Many good people read the manuscript and offered valuable suggestions, corrections, encouragement, and information.
The Herodotus thing. It doesn’t mean that the dead are happy,” said Shadow. “It means that you can’t judge the shape of someone’s life until it’s over and done.
That was the trouble with hiding things. Sometimes, if you were in a hurry, you left them behind. Even important things.
I wondered where the illusion of the second moon had come from, but I only wondered for a moment, and then I dismissed it from my thoughts. Perhaps it was an afterimage, I decided, or a ghost: something that had stirred in my mind, for a moment, so powerfully that I believed it to be real, but now was gone, and faded into the past like a memory forgotten, or a shadow into the dusk.
We are gathered here at the end of what Bradbury called the October Country: a state of mind as much as it is a time. All the harvests are in, the frost is on the ground, there’s mist in the crisp night air and it’s time to tell ghost stories.
But I do not actually remember being a monster. I just remember wanting my own way. Small children believe themselves to be gods, or some of them do, and they can only be satisfied when the rest of the world goes along with their way of seeing things.
We have been telling each other tales of otherness, of life beyond the grave, for a long time; stories that prickle the flesh and make the shadows deeper and, most important, remind us that we live, and that there is something special, something unique and remarkable about the state of being alive.
We build the stories in our heads. We take words, and we give them power, and we look out through other eyes, and we see, and experience, what others see. I.
I hate dreams. I don’t want any more dreams. I don’t want any more anything.
Listen, blood of my blood, although I’m a hard man to anger, and I love you deeply, if you interrupt me again so help me I’ll rip out your throat with my teeth.
I created cat myths, which cats tell each other in the night.
It was as if he had just seen a door open to another place, somewhere worlds away where hanged men blew in the wind at every crossroads, where witches shrieked overhead in the night.
Prose fiction is something you build up from twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, and you alone, using your imagination, create a world, and people it and look out through other eyes.