You cannot blame everything on the enemy.
What the brain does by itself is infinitely more fascinating and complex than any response it can make to chemical stimulation.
If I had to pick a hero, it would be Charles Darwin – the size of his mind, which included all that scientific curiosity and knowledge seeking, and the ability to put it all together. There is a genuine spirituality about Darwin’s thinking.
I don’t write tracts, I write novels. I’m not a preacher, I’m a fiction writer.
I do try to separate my personal activism – showing up at a demonstration or something – from what I write.
I certainly wasn’t happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can’t earn, and can’t keep, and often don’t even recognize at the time; I mean joy.
In so far as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void.
There’s a great fear of the imagination. It’s a dangerous thing. It’s out of control, it’s subversive.
To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention.
I came into science fiction at a very good time, when the doors were getting thrown open to all kinds of more experimental writing, more literary writing, riskier writing. It wasn’t all imitation Heinlein or Asimov. And of course, women were creeping in, infiltrating. Infesting the premises.
Despair speaks evenly, in a quiet voice.
To know there is a choice is to have to make the choice: change or stay: river or rock.
All men were alien one to another, at times, not only aliens.
The thing about working with time, instead of against it, he thought, is that it is not wasted. Even pain counts.
I am no more lonely than the loon on the pond that laughs so loud.
No man, no power, can bind the action of wizardry or still the words of power. For they are the very words of Making, and one who could silence them could unmake the world.
I’m not a quester or a searcher for the truth. I don’t really think there is one answer, so I never went looking for it. My impulse is less questing and more playful. I like trying on ideas and ways of life and religious approaches. I’m just not a good candidate for conversion.
I’d rather get bad news from an honest man than lies from a flatterer.
Morality is an utterly meaningless term unless defined as the good one does to others, the fulfilling of one’s function in the sociopolitical whole.
You know, I don’t think a lot about why one book connects with its readers and another doesn’t. Probably because I don’t want to start thinking, “Am I popular?” I spent way too much time thinking about that in high school.