In your reading, find books to improve your color sense, your sense of shape and size in the world.
The history of science fiction started in the caves 20,000 years ago. The ideas on the walls of the cave were problems to be solved. It’s problem solving. Primitive scientific knowledge, primitive dreams, primitive blueprinting: to solve problems.
God, how we get our fingers in each other’s clay. That’s friendship, each playing the potter to see what shapes we can make of each other.
A book is a loaded gun.
I’m interested in having fun with ideas, throwing them up in the air like confetti and then running under them.
You don’t pay any attention to anything anyone else says, no opinions. The important thing is to explode with a story, to emotionalize a story, not to think it. You start thinking – the story’s going to die on its feet.
Without the library, you have no civilization.
Suddenly the day was gone, night came out from under each tree and spread.
You’ve been put on the world to love the act of being alive.
And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right.
My job is to help you fall in love.
To feed your Muse, then, you should always have been hungry about life since you were a child. If not, it is a little late to start.
No person ever died that had a family.
We are anthill men upon an anthill world.
Friendship is an island that you retreat to and you all fall on the floor and laugh at all the other ninnies that don’t have enough brains to have your good taste.
The sun burnt every day. It burnt time.
Don’t think about things, just do them; don’t predict them, just make them.
You’re not like the others. I’ve seen a few; I know. When I talk, you look at me. When I said something about the moon, you looked at the moon.
Don’t write for money. Write because you love to do something. If you write for money, you won’t write anything worth reading.
So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.