It is possible to have words come to your mind, and still refrain from speaking them aloud.
When you really know somebody you can’t hate them. Or maybe it’s just that you can’t really know them until you stop hating them.
You can’t change what you don’t understand.
A character is what he does, yes – but even more, a character is what he means to do.
If you listen very carefully, you can hear the good fairy come in the night and leave our assignment for tomorrow.
Oh no, real life is escape. The great terrors, the horrors – we hope – of your life come from reading fiction.
History is an omlette. THe eggs are already broken.
Perhaps I’m hiding from myself. Perhaps I don’t want to be what I’m supposed to be. Or perhaps I don’t want to keep living the life I already started to live.
Perhaps every writer who thoroughly creates a fictional world will inevitably create a mirror of his own time and yet also create a world that no one else but him has ever visited...
Science Fiction has rivets, fantasy has trees.
My own feeling is that human happiness is a very random thing, and bestows itself willy-nilly, and there’s not much deserving about the matter.
Personal humiliation was painful. Humiliation of one’s family was much worse. Humiliation of one’s social status was agony to bear. But humiliation of one’s nation was the most excruciating of human miseries.
Where loyalty bound creatures together, they became something larger, something new and whole and inexplicable.
Of course, I also hear from critics who detest what I do, and while sometimes I feel rather proud of having made various the loathsome people or groups angry, at other times I wonder why I put up with such grief.
One bachelor is an irritation. Ten thousand bachelors are a war.
What a waste of time to be posthumously famous.
Peter, you’re twelve years old. I’m ten. They have a word for people our age. They call us children and they treat us like mice.
I need you to be clever, Bean. I need you to think of solutions to problems we haven’t seen yet. I want you to try things that no one has ever tried because they’re absolutely stupid.
Love is random; fear is inevitable.
Knowledge is just opinion that you trust enough to act upon.