There’s a good deal in common between the mind’s eye and the TV screen, and though the TV set has all too often been the boobtube, it could be, it can be, the box of dreams.
Our model of the cosmos must be as inexhaustible as the cosmos. A complexity that includes not only duration but creation, not only being but becoming, not only geometry but ethics. It is not the answer we are after, but only how to ask the question.
I was in too much haste, and now have no time left. I traded all the sunlight and the cities and the distant lands for a handful of power, for a shadow, for the dark.
If they come prying they can leave curious.
There’s no way to use power for good.
It was men’s ambitions, they said, that had perverted all the arts to ends of gain.
By such literalism, fundamentalism, religions betrayed the best intentions of their founders. Reducing thought to formula, replacing choice by obedience, these preachers turned the living word into dead law.
A moral choice in its basic terms appears to be a choice that favors survival: a choice made in favor of life.
There are dance artists, painting artists and writing artists. Authors are writing artists. You can practice art in whatever medium you choose, and words are mine.
I have no control over my writing. I have lots of good intentions, but no control. There’s a story that wants to be told.
Realism is a very sophisticated form of literature, a very grown-up one. And that may be its weakness. But fantasy seems to be eternal and omnipresent and always attractive to kids.
It’s not a weapon or a woman can make a man, or magery either, or any power, anything but himself.
To claim power over what you do not understand is not wise, nor is the end of it likely to be good.
Between thought and spoken word is a gap where intention can enter, the symbol be twisted aside, and the lie come to be.
There are things that outweigh comfort, unless one is an old woman or a cat.
The historic function of a Senator from Oregon is to drive all the other Senators mad.
Now perhaps an excessive dread of overpopulation – overcrowding – reflects not an outward reality, but an inward state of mind. If you feel overcrowded when you’re not, what does that mean? Maybe that you’re afraid of human contact – of being close to people, of being touched.
Wrongs done could not be righted, but at least they were not still being done.
The danger in trying to do good is that the mind comes to confuse the intent of goodness with the act of doing things well.
If success in selling is my primary interest, I am not primarily a writer, but a salesperson. If I teach success in selling as the writer’s primary objective, I am not teaching writing; I’m teaching, or pretending to teach, the production and marketing of a commodity.