Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Suffering is dysfunctional, except as a bodily warning against danger. Psychologically and socially it's merely destructive.
Much arrogance is necessary equipment for an artist, I think. Not sufficient, but necessary. It carries one across the gaps.
... the habit of literature [is] the best defense against believing the half-truths of ideologues and the lies of demagogues.
What's needed in this case is conscious and serious practice in hearing, and using, and being used by, other people's voices.
To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.
You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.
Well, the secret to writing is writing. It's only a secret to people who don't want to hear it. Writing is how you be a writer.
What the brain does by itself is infinitely more fascinating and complex than any response it can make to chemical stimulation.
To oppose something is to maintain it... You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.
It is not altogether a bad thing to have criminal ancestors. An arsonist grandfather may bequeath one a nose for smelling smoke.
He knew now, and the knowledge was hard, that his task had never been to undo what he had done, but to finish what he had begun.
To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention.
I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.
We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.
Any artist must expect to work amid the total, rational indifference of everybody else to their work, for years, perhaps for life.
A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it... By using words well they strengthen their souls.
I think hard times are coming. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality.
The airport bookstore did not sell books, only bestsellers, which Sita Dulip cannot read without risking a severe systemic reaction.
At this point, realism is perhaps the least adequate means of understanding or portraying the incredible realities of our existence.
The island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-racked Northeast Sea, is a land famous for wizards.
We like to think we live in daylight, but half the world is always dark, and fantasy, like poetry, speaks the language of the night.
The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.
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.
Crankish attacks on the freedom to read are common at present. When backed and coordinated by organized groups, they become sinister.
You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.
The pornography of violence of course far exceeds, in volume and general acceptance, sexual pornography, in this Puritan land of ours.
So the first step out of childhood is made all at once, without looking before or behind, without caution, and nothing held in reserve.
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.
Besides, when you say you're a feminist it annoys the bigots and the old farts and the prissy ladies so much, it's kind of irresistible.
In so far as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void.
The use of imaginative fiction is to deepen your understanding of your world, and your fellow men, and your own feelings, and your destiny.
It always seemed to me they're sort of alike ... magic and music. Spells and tunes. For one thing, you have to get them just exactly right.
For a fiction writer, a storyteller, the world is full of stories, and when a story is there, it's there, and you just reach up and pick it.
Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I'm going to go fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to unbuild walls.
Hate gets going, it goes round, it gets older and tighter and older and tighter, until it holds a person inside it like a fist holds a stick.
Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.
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.
A forest ecology is a delicate one. If the forest perishes, its fauna may go with it. The Athshean word for world is also the word for forest.
Nothing said in words ever came out quite even. Things in words got twisted and ran together, instead of staying straight and fitting together.
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.
I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after 'semicolons,' and another one after 'now.
I can never get used to the fact, though I know it, that women are born cynics. Men have to learn cynicism. Infant girls could teach it to them.
The same old hypocrisy. Life is a fight, and the strongest wins. All civilization does is hide the blood and cover up the hate with pretty words!
Her work, I really think her work is finding what her real work is and doing it, her work, her own work, her being human, her being in the world.
If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. ...But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion.
The explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an explorer, only an adventurer; and his sons are born in exile.
Morality is an utterly meaningless term unless defined as the good one does to others, the fulfilling of one's function in the sociopolitical whole.
The model of modern Western civilization is the virus: the pure bit of information, which turns its environment into endless reproductions of itself.
A scientist can pretend that his work isn't himself, it's merely the impersonal truth. An artist can't hide behind the truth. He can't hide anywhere.
When the enemy enthusiastically embraces you, and the fellow countrymen bitterly reject you, it is hard not to wonder if you are, in fact, a traitor.