To be oneself is a rare thing, and a great one.
If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.
If civilization has an opposite, it is war.
I think hard times are coming. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality.
So the first step out of childhood is made all at once, without looking before or behind, without caution, and nothing held in reserve.
Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.
The fish in the creek said nothing. Fish never do. Few people know what fish think about injustice, or anything else.
The story is not in the plot but in the telling.
My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and gobbled until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.
Can true function arise from basic dysfunction?
We like to think we live in daylight, but half the world is always dark, and fantasy, like poetry, speaks the language of the night.
See, the thing is, as a writer you are free. You are about the freest person that ever was. Your freedom is what you have bought with your solitude, your loneliness.
We need writers who know the difference between the production of a commodity and the practice of an art.
We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.
Readers, after all, are making the world with you. You give them the materials, but it’s the readers who build that world in their own minds.
I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.
Science fiction is not prescriptive; it is descriptive.
Great artists make the roads; good teachers and good companions can point them out. But there ain’t no free rides, baby.
Morning comes whether you set the alarm or not.
In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood. Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it’s not poison; and we will all come to the end together, and even to the beginning: living, as we do, in the middle.