Ultimately you write alone. And ultimately you and you alone can judge your work. The judgment that a work is complete – this is what I meant to do, and I stand by it – can come only from the writer, and it can be made rightly only by a writer who’s learned to read her own work.
In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we’re done with it, we may find – if it’s a good novel – that we’re a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But it’s very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed.
I am without a face among men. I am not seen. I speak and am not heard. I come and am not welcomed. There is no place by the fire for me, nor food on the table for me, nor a bed made for me to lie in. Yet I still have my name.
Old age isn’t a state of mind. It’s an existential situation. Would you say to a person paralyzed from the waist down, “Oh, you aren’t a cripple! You’re only as paralyzed as you think you are! My cousin broke her back once but she got right over it and now she’s in training for the marathon!
The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
He wandered among the tanks for a long time, and often came back with her to the laboratory and the aquaria, submitting his physicist’s arrogance to those small strange lives, to the existence of beings to whom the present is eternal, beings that do not explain themselves and need not ever justify their ways to man.
We shape each other to be human.
He will die of it.” “That he will: what does a man die of but his death?
My dogs have barked at a beggar tonight and he proves a prince of starlight.
Why, why is a girl brought up at home to be a woman in exile the rest of her life?
It’s dangerous to confuse self-expression with communication.
Justice is in the hands of the gods, an old poet wrote, mortal hands hold only mercy and the sword.
The path never reached it, though it always seemed to be about to.
Housekeeping, the art of the infinite, is no game for amateurs.
Where man goes, trees die; or, to paraphrase Tacitus, we make a desert and call it progress.
Evil, in this book, has an immediate, ugly, human shape, because I saw evil not as some horde of foreign demons with bad teeth and superweapons but as an insidious and ever-present enemy in my own daily life in my own country: the ruinous irresponsibility of greed.
There are two kinds of knowledge, local and universal. There are two kinds of time, local and historical.
It doesn’t have to be the way it is. That is what fantasy says. It doesn’t say “Anything goes” – that’s irresponsibility, when two and one make five, or forty-seven...
So honest conversation about concerning geezerhood takes place mostly among geezers.
If you eat your... leafy greens and... develop your abs and blabs... in order to live a long life, that’s good, and maybe it will work. But the longer a life is, the more of it will be in old age.