James Davis Nicoll, on the 1962 nominees: “Terry Pratchett has his own sword forged by his own hands from meteoric iron, which must be of considerable utility when negotiating contracts.
She wasn’t famous then,” Pat said. “Nobody is. You never know until too late. They’re just people like everyone else. Anyone you know might become famous. Or not. You don’t know which ones will make a difference or if any of them will. You might become famous yourself. You might change the world.
Fiction’s nice. Fiction lets you select and simplify.
Our myths, our legends, aren’t necessarily true, but they are truly necessary.
Welsh mutates initial consonants. Actually all languages do, but most of them take centuries, while Welsh does it while your mouth is still open.
Across the street, there were parties at other windows. The sky was fading behind the roof peaks and chimney tops, which stood out like cardboard cutout silhouettes, and I looked from them to the lit windows, and back again. A flock of birds, pigeons probably, wheeled across the sky, heading home before dark.
Maybe some of the masters really believed they could make it work, but I think what they really wanted wasn’t to do it themselves but for somebody else to have made it real and for them to have been born there.
I didn’t laugh, but it was a near thing. It’s hard when someone is just exactly like a parody.
Telephone conversations are so inadequate, so lacking in expression and gesture and everything.
Human nature is against it. People just tend to behave in certain ways because they are people. And.
Some say that I have self-awareness but no soul, that I am nothing but a machine. This seems un-Platonic as well as unfriendly, but it cannot be discounted as a terrifying possibility. I cannot erase this option simply because I dislike it so much. That too would be un-Platonic.
May her memory be a blessing.
To add insult to injury there’s a television at the end of the ward. It’s unavoidable, and even more unbearable than usual as it’s constantly tuned to ITV, so there are adverts. I wonder if hell is like this? I’d definitely prefer lakes of sulphur and at least being able to swim about in them.
The weather has changed completely in the last week. Last Saturday was mild and sunny, autumn looking reluctantly back over its shoulder towards summer. Today it was wet and blustery, autumn barrelling forward impatiently into winter.
Morally, magic is just indefensible.
Trees are what paper was, and wants to be.
I can’t talk about my childhood at all, because cannot say “I” when I mean “we,” and if I say “we” it leads to a conversation about how I have a dead sister, instead of what I want to talk about. I found that out in the summer. So I don’t talk about it.
I don’t think you realize how different it is for me than for you. You can make your way by your own wits and claws, while I must always be dependent on some male to protect me. Wits I may have, but claws I am without, and while hands are useful for writing and fine work they are no use in a battle.
Writers are not nice people. We can’t be.
They were not always in accord, but over time they developed such good communication that even their most bitter disagreements became part of their axiomatic assumption of mutual long-term ongoing love and life together.
Canada’s slow, complicated, and expensive emigration policy, which on one level nobody can admit exists mainly to keep out Americans who are desperate for healthcare.