Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm very happy alone.
The big talent is persistence.
Science fiction is not formulaic.
We are a naturally hierarchical species.
I'm not pessimistic about much of anything.
How dull it is to have people defining you.
A 10-pound sack of potatoes lasts a long time.
I just knew there were stories I wanted to tell.
Too many writers get into that gross-'em-out factor.
Every story I create, creates me. I write to create myself.
Science fiction frees you to go anyplace and examine anything.
Most of us, if we're not careful, tend to dehumanize the enemy.
I used to give up writing like some people would give up smoking.
I recognize we will pay more attention when we have different leadership.
I have a huge and savage conscience that won't let me get away with things.
I was raised Baptist, and I like the fact that I got my conscience installed early.
I would never have been a good scientist - my attention span was too short for that.
Movies are extremely imitative of one another. Whatever works, people will try to do it.
I learned that five- and-six-year-old kids have already figured out how to be intolerant.
Science fiction let me do both. It let me look into science and stick my nose in everywhere.
Delusional pain hurts just as much as pain from actual trauma. So what if it's all in your head?
Hollywood wants to go for the flash, because that's what a lot of them think science fiction is.
No... a novel is a long business. I'm a slow writer, even when I'm doing very well I write slowly.
The thing about science fiction is that it's totally wide open. But it's wide open in a conditional way.
Science fiction, extrasensory perception, and black people are judged by the worst elements they produce.
I began reading science fiction before I was 12 and started writing science fiction around the same time.
But my problem with fantasy, and horror, and related genres, is that sometimes the problems are illogical.
If vampires were a separate species, and they were into genetic engineering, what would they engineer for?
I had a long period of writing what I think of as 'save the world' novels. 'Fledgling' was a chance to play.
Religion is everywhere. There are no human societies without it, whether they acknowledge it as a religion or not.
Getting your writing criticized can be a lot like getting skinned, and you respond to it just as enthusiastically.
My race and sex had a great deal more to do with what people believed I could do than with what I actually could do.
With a disaster like global warming, it's too late to worry about when it's looming except to figure out how to adapt to it.
Most vampires I have discovered are men for some reason. I guess it's because of Dracula; people are kind of feeding off that.
I think we need people with stronger ideals than John Kerry or Bill Clinton. I think we need people with more courage and vision.
I don't know how much of a market there is for space opera. Just because it's in the movies doesn't mean magazines are buying it.
I pecked my stories out two-fingered on the Remington portable typewriter my mother had bought me. I had begged for it when I was ten.
People have the right to call themselves whatever they like. That doesn't bother me. It's other people doing the calling that bothers me.
Once you grow past Mommy and Daddy coming running when you're hurt, you're really on your own. You're alone, and there's no one to help you.
And by the way, I wanted to point out that Kindred is not science fiction. You'll note there's no science in it. It's a kind of grim fantasy.
I wanted to write a novel that would make others feel the history: the pain and fear that black people have had to live through in order to endure.
I don't write about good and evil with this enormous dichotomy. I write about people. I write about people doing the kinds of things that people do.
Writing is one of the few professions in which you can psychoanalyse yourself, get rid of hostilities and frustrations in public, and get paid for it.
No one was going to stop me from writing and no one had to really guide me towards science fiction. It was natural, really, that I would take that interest.
Tolerance, like any aspect of peace, is forever a work in progress, never completed, and, if we're as intelligent as we like to think we are, never abandoned.
Here I was into astronomy, and here into anthropology, and there I go into geology. It was much more fun to be able to research and write about whatever I wanted to.
On the other hand, I was very much interested in the way people behaved, the human dance, how they seemed to move around each other. I wanted to play around with that.
Fantasy is totally wide open; all you really have to do is follow the rules you've set. But if you're writing about science, you have to first learn what you're writing about.
So fantasy was fine early on, and when I discovered science fiction, I was very happy with it, because my first interest in science fiction came with an interest in astronomy.
Beware, all too often we say what we hear others say. We think what we are told that we think. We see what we are permitted to see. Worse, we see what we are told that we see.