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.
There are no right answers to wrong questions.
To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.
To be whole is to be part; true voyage is return.
We’re each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?
You sit down and you do it, and you do it, and you do it, until you have learned to do it.
As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.
We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.
I talk about the gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.
All makers must leave room for the acts of the spirit. But they have to work hard and carefully, and wait patiently, to deserve them.
To see that your life is a story while you’re in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well.
Writing makes no noise, except groans, and it can be done everywhere, and it is done alone.
It had never occurred to me before that music and thinking are so much alike. In fact you could say music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music.
The children of the revolution are always ungrateful, and the revolution must be grateful that it is so.
What goes too long unchanged destroys itself.