Manipulated, one manipulates others.
To read and to write. Some writers have to be told to write. They think their job is to meet agents and have experiences and they can just be rich and famous. Their job is to write. Some really don’t realize that. And you can’t write unless you read.
The counsel of the dead is not profitable to the living.
For a fiction writer, a storyteller, the world is full of stories, and when a story is there, it’s there, and you just reach up and pick it.
Planets were very large places, on any scale but that of the spaces in between them.
It is only when science asks why, instead of simply describing how, that it becomes more than technology. When it asks why, it discovers Relativity. When it only shows how, it invents the atom bomb, and then puts its hands over its eye and says, My God what have I done?
Ah, genre. A word only a Frenchman could love.
Writers need to learn their trade, and how to negotiate the increasingly difficult marketplace. The trade can be taught and learned just as the craft can. But a workshop where the trade is the principal focus of interest is not a writing workshop. It is a business class.
We sleep researchers like cats, you know; they sleep a lot!
Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light?
Is it the gods who set this fire in our hearts, or do we each make our fierce desire into a god?
Genre fiction was looked at as a ghetto, but I wonder now if realist fiction, sealing itself off in the glum suburbs of a dysfunctional society, denying the use of imagination, was the ghetto.
A wrong that cannot be repaired must be transcended.
When the enemy enthusiastically embraces you, and the fellow countrymen bitterly reject you, it is hard not to wonder if you are, in fact, a traitor.
Skill in writing frees you to write what you want to write. It may also show you what you want to write. Craft enables art.
Almost anything carried to a logical extreme becomes depressing.
Love is the true condition of human life.
Love’s just one of the ways through, and it can go wrong, and miss. Pain never misses. But therefore we don’t have much choice about enduring it! We will, whether we want to or not.
No matter how intelligent a man is, he can’t see what he doesn’t know how to see.
It was easy to share when there was enough, even barely enough, to go round. But when there was not enough? Then force entered in; might making right; power, and its tool, violence, and its most devoted ally, the averted eye.