Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Even the most heartening of philosophical vistas is no match for, say, a toothache, if it happens to be your own.
I read poetry every day. I look at it as an exercise, a kind of T'ai Chi for writers. It teaches economy of form.
Life is full of doors that don't open when you knock, equally spaced amid those that open when you don't want them to.
Thus did I bear Sir Lancelot de Lac to the Keep of Ganleon, whom I trusted like a brother. That is to say, not at all.
It is no shame to lose to me, mortal. Even among mythical creatures there are very few who can give a unicorn a good game.
Do you work for the government, any government?” "I pay taxes, which means I work for the government, part of the time. Yes.
I saw my earlier selves as different people, acquaintances I had outgrown. I wondered how I could ever have been some of them.
In any novel I write, I have in my mind several things which happened in the protagonist's past which I never mention in the book.
At the end of the season of sorrows comes the time of rejoicing. Spring, like a well-oiled clock, noiselessly indicates this time.
A powerful flight of the imagination . . . an entirely enjoyable reading experience, wrought by a pair of writers noted for excellence.
Then you must reconcile yourself to the fact that something is always hurt by any change. If you do this, you will not be hurt yourself.
Nothing we did in those days has caused a change." "Because of what we did, things remained as they were, rather than getting worse," I told him.
My favorite form is the short story. From an aesthetics stand point you really have to pare down to the bone. You can't write a throw-away scene.
I have decided, it is fruitless. For I am no longer sure of anything concerning my existance. A philosopher is a dead poet and a dying theologian.
Space opera was the sort of story on which I grew up. When I was younger, I read heavily in pulp magazines. They were readily available in the stores.
I would never rest until I held vengeance and the throne within my hand, and good night sweet prince to anybody who stood between me and these things.
I watched the spinning stars, grateful, sad and proud, as only a man who has outlived his destiny and realizes he might yet forge himself another, can be.
While I had often said that I wanted to die in bed, what I really meant was that in my old age I wanted to be stepped on by an elephant while making love.
If a building is falling on you, you don't concern yourself with the horn of an approaching car. You deal with the most immediate peril first. That's survival.
To waste! You are unknown and unwanted, save by me. This, because you are fairly adept at the various embalming arts and you occasionally compose a clever epitaph.
Two days like icebergs bleak, blank, half-melting, all frigid, mainly out of sight, and definitely a threat to peace of mind drifted by and were good to put behind.
I always wanted to write, ever since I was a kid. I started writing at the age of 11. All I wanted to do was finish my education and have my nights free for writing.
Strygalldwir is my name. Conjure with it and I will eat your heart and liver." "Conjure with it? I can't even pronounce it, and my cirrhosis would give you indigestion.
The enemy of the moment is not as important as our own inner weakness. If this is not mended we are already defeated, though no foreign conqueror stands within our walls.
Robots are very tricky to design and expensive, whereas humans are cheaply manufactured. Humans can handle things with greater manual dexterity than most robots I've known.
Why could you not have left me as I was, in the sea of being?" "Because the world has need of your humility, your piety, your great teaching and your Machiavellian scheming.
There are stars, stars, scattered stars, blackness all between. They ripple and fold and bend, and they rush toward him, rush by him. Their colors are blazing and pure as angels' eyes.
I fail to see what difference it makes whether it be supernatural or not--so long as it is malefic, possesses great powers and life span and has the ability to change its shape at will.
I've always been impulsive. My thinking is usually pretty good, but I always seem to do it after I do my talking — by which time I've generally destroyed all basis for further conversation.
I do admire great essayists. I'm a particular fan of good nature writing. People like Robert Finch. I read great quantities of writing by naturalists. I've been studying the genre for years.
An army, great in space, may offer opposition in a brief span of time. One man, brief in space, must spread his opposition across a period of many years if he is to have a chance of succeeding.
I tried a very fancy attack I'd learned in France, which involved a beat, a feint in quarte, a feint in sixte, and a lunge veering off into an attack on his wrist. I nicked him, and the blood flowed.
I like libraries. It makes me feel comfortable and secure to have walls of words, beautiful and wise, all around me. I always feel better when I can see that there is something to hold back the shadows.
Death and Light are everywhere, always, and they begin, end, strive, attend, into and upon the Dream of the Nameless that is the world, burning words within Samsara, perhaps to create a thing of beauty.
The places where I have the nameless character in 'My Name Is Legion' meet his boss are real places I've been to. That works well for tax purposes, writing into my stories the places I've actually visited.
Did you ever look back at some moment in your past and have it suddenly grow so vivid that all the intervening years seemed brief, dreamlike, impersonal—the motions of a May afternoon surrendered to routine?
His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god. He preferred to drop the Maha- and the -atman, however, and called himself Sam. He never claimed to be a god, but then he never claimed not to be a god.
It would be nice if there were some one thing constant and unchanging in the universe. If there is such a thing, then it is a thing which would have to be stronger than love, and it is a thing which I do not know.
Tonight I will suck the marrow from your bones!” it said. “I will dry them and work them most cunningly into instruments of music! Whenever I play upon them, your spirit will writhe in bodiless agony!” “You burn prettily,” I said.
I got the idea for my novel 'Lord of Light' when I cut myself shaving just before I was to go on a panel at a convention. I had to go out there with this big gash in my face. I remember that I thought, 'I wish I could change bodies.'
I see myself as a novelist, period. I mean, the material I work with is what is classified as science fiction and fantasy, and I really don't think about these things when I'm writing. I'm just thinking about telling a story and developing my characters.
My mind spun for a second before it drifted, and in that second I knew that of all pleasures a drink of cold water when you are thirsty, liquor when you are not, sex, a cigarette after many days without one there is none of them can compare with sleep. Sleep is best.
I never plan ahead, with the exception of the Amber books which had to proceed in sequence. But I don't really like to know what I'm going to be working on a year in advance. So I just sign blank contracts for books and whatever strikes me as a good idea is what I write about.
I don't know that I ever wanted greatness, on its own. It seems rather like wanting to be an engineer, rather than wanting to design something--or wanting to be a writer, rather than wanting to write. It should be a by-product, not a thing in itself. Otherwise, it's just an ego trip.
In a sense, fantasy is a freer play of the imagination. You can achieve exactly the situation you want with less groundwork, less of a need to fill in all of the background. For science fiction, I would use a lot of sources to set up, for instance, what a being from another planet would be like.
I have often thought of doing a story with someone either as a human being or as a robot who, by a series of stages, changes into the other end of the spectrum. By the story's end, he'd be either totally robotic or totally human, the opposite of what he once was. And possibly... bring him back again.
One of my standard - and fairly true - responses to the question as to how story ideas come to me is that story ideas only come to me for short stories. With longer fiction, it is a character (or characters) coming to visit, and I am then obliged to collaborate with him/her/it/them in creating the story.
Nick swore he'd die with this boots on, on some exotic safari, but he found his Kilimanjaro in a hospital on Earth, where they'd cured everything that was bothering him, except for the galloping pneumonia he'd picked up in the hospital. That had been, roughly, two hundred and fifty years ago. I'd been a pallbearer.
I have a fondness for technology. It's great to spend hours puttering around with mechanical things gotten from junkyards and visualizing what their use might be. Especially if you come across a gadget or tool and you don't know what it is and you try to figure it out. I'm fascinated by processes, whatever they might be.
I read Herman Hesse's 'Siddhartha' while I was writing 'Lord of Light' along with many other things. It seemed a good time to read it so I could see what he had to say about Buddha. In my first chapter, I was thinking in terms of the big battle scene in the 'Mahabarata.' It helped me in visualizing the battle in my novel.