As a writer, you are free.
The reader can’t take much for granted in a fiction where the scenery can eat the characters.
Claude Levi-Strauss has been a great source of fruitful irritation to my mind.
In art, ‘good enough’ is not good enough.
Those who dislike fantasy are very often equally bored or repelled by science. They don’t like either hobbits, or quasars; they don’t feel at home with them; they don’t want complexities, remoteness. If there is any such connection, I’ll bet that it is basically an aesthetic one.
You must come to terms with your wholeself. the wholeness which exceeds all our virtue and all our vice.
There is no information about corporations. There is only disinformation.
Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else.
If your voice is heard by more people because you’ve earned some kind of name and fame, your silence on an issue of urgent moral importance is even more of a betrayal. Privilege is obligation.
Virginity is now a mere preamble or waiting room to be got out of as soon as possible; it is without significance.
Well, the secret to writing is writing. It’s only a secret to people who don’t want to hear it. Writing is how you be a writer.
Dreams take short cuts.
I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived.
Suffering is dysfunctional, except as a bodily warning against danger. Psychologically and socially it’s merely destructive.
Greed puts out the sun.
Most civilisations, perhaps, look shinier in general terms and from several light-years away.
A machine is more blameless, more sinless even than any animal. It has no intentions whatsoever but our own.
The pornography of violence of course far exceeds, in volume and general acceptance, sexual pornography, in this Puritan land of ours.
Crankish attacks on the freedom to read are common at present. When backed and coordinated by organized groups, they become sinister.
If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself.