Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I take pride in taking care of all the housework so that my wife, who works as a designer for Martha Stewart, won't need to sacrifice any of her leisure time when she gets home.
The idea of a talent that was bigger than an artist's ability to choose to use it, that would dictate the artist's life more than the artist could dictate, was interesting to me.
Homophobia's just one form of abjection, and wherever you have a marker of deviance - skin colour, gender, gender identity, disability - you get the same mechanisms of prejudice.
But I should not have to explain to you how important it is for science and simplicity to coexist. One must not fear to be a little child again, when times of wonder are at hand.
We forgave, followed and accepted because we liked the way he looked. And he had a pretty wife. Camelot was fun, even for the peasants, as long as it was televised to their huts.
I think that what's unique about sci-fi - at least from the view of a lot of Chinese writers - is that sci-fi is least-rooted in the particular culture that they're writing from.
For us scientists, on the other wing, life is not quite so simple. Because we learn the unknown. Unlike, hah-hah, our esteemed friends the philosophers, who learn the unknowable.
We don't really have a movie industry; we have a trailer industry. The movie guys make five minutes worth of stuff to get people in the theatre, and eighty-five minutes of filler.
In my experience ideology is a lot like religion; it's a belief system and most people cling to it long after it becomes clear that their ideology doesn't describe the real world.
A trust-in the sense of a valuable asset placed in the care of someone to whom it does not ultimately belong-captures, more or less, my understanding of what it is to have a child.
I hadn't given much thought to the prospect of a Hugo nomination at the time it happened, but obviously once you're nominated, winning one seems a bit less far-fetched than before.
What exactly did we learn in kindergarten? Nothing we wouldn't have learned if we;d stayed home. Okay, we learned that sometimes, by the time you get to the bathroom, it's too late.
Nice girls are not supposed to be hungry. They are not supposed to feed themselves or care about their own food. They're definitely not supposed to take food out of a child's mouth.
Diaspora starts about a thousand years from now. Most of human civilisation has moved inside computers; essentially, a major branch of our descendants consists of conscious software.
When you start to look at Native American history, you realize that, very far from being a peaceful, morally superior people, Native Americans were not that different from Europeans.
Everyone would tell me they couldn't identify with sexual abuse. No one says they can't identify with the tales of the Greek gods and goddesses because they don't live on Mt. Olympus.
Of course most people underestimate the warrior characteristics of the Anglo-Saxon and Norman peoples anyway. It takes a heap of piety to keep a Viking from wanting to go sack a city.
Labels like 'Chinese Science Fiction' or 'Western Science Fiction' summarize a vast field of work, all of which are diverse and driven by individual authors, with individual concerns.
That's the thing about a great book. Every time you read it, it's different, because you're different. You've changed since the last time you picked it up, things have happened to you.
When people ask me to define science fiction and fantasy I say they are the literatures that explore the fact that we are toolmakers and users, and are always changing our environment.
We're basically after Joe's beer money, and Joe likes his beer, so you better make sure that what you give him is at least as pleasurable to him as having his six-pack of beer would be.
As an editor, I must often tell writers that their stories "do not fit our present needs." But there are times when I want to reply: "Sir, I would not trust you to write a ransom note."
There was something so immensely redemptive and exciting for me to imagine that my unknown father was not just a man who had abandoned me but a noble man of adventure who had no choice.
I met my first boyfriend when we were 13, playing 'Dungeons and Dragons' in the basement of my local comics shop. We were from the same small town in Maine but went to different schools.
One of the advantages of having an imaginary boyfriend is that he exists only for you, therefore he can not be stolen. The disadvantage is that you can not introduce him to your friends.
Stuart Rojstaczer writes with enormous wit, style and empathy, and The Mathematician's Shiva is a big-hearted, rollickingly funny novel that's impossible to put down. A tremendous debut.
The best advice I got as a writer was also the first advice, which came from the late fantasy author and editor Karl Edward Wagner: Any agent who charges to look at your work is a crook.
There's a certain amount of world-building that I hold off on until I need it for the story. World building in advance isn't really my thing, maybe because I didn't grow up playing RPG's.
This is the biggest trick of the sort of thing I write: creating fun, powerful stories with tons of interesting stuff going socially and culturally that doesn't overly confuse the reader.
Necromancer gives readers what they've long waited for -- a rousing conclusion to the trilogy begun in Nomadin and continued in NiDemon. Put this trilogy on your 'must-keep' shelf. Enjoy!
Yes, we can make prudent choices as parents, but we can't create an environment where there's zero risk for our children. Not only is that impossible, I don't think it's desirable, either.
Australian SF book publishing has undergone a boom recently, and sometimes it's easier for new writers to sell a book to a local publisher first, which then makes a US edition more likely.
Fundamentally, all art is about human beings. You're always showing larger moral questions through the smaller moral, philosophical, or political choices through one character in the book.
The manuscript you submit [should not] contain any flaws that you can identify - it is up to the writer to do the work, rather than counting on some stranger in Manhattan to do it for him.
Man studied birds for centuries, trying to learn how to make a machine to fly like them. He never did do the trick; his final success came when he broke away entirely and tried new methods.
'The Grace of Kings' draws on Western traditions as much as it does on Chinese traditions, though the bones of the story are drawn from the Chu-Han Contention period before the Han Dynasty.
Among environmentalists sharing two or three beers, the notion is quite common that if only some calamity could wipe out the entire human race, other species might once again have a chance.
There is a sweet little horror story that is only two sentences long: The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock at the door... Two sentences and an ellipsis of three dots.
What a tiresome place America would be if freedom meant we all had to think alike or be the same color or wear the same gray flannel suit! That road leads to the conformity of the graveyard!
It's incredible to me that any two individual minds, trapped in their skulls and bodies and histories and unique experiences, are able to reach across the void between them and touch at all.
The secret to being a rider in the hippodrome wasn't that you must be agile, or that you must be good with horses...It was that you must hide inside your costume a little of a killer's heart.
I'm incredibly pleased to be working with Marco Palmieri and Tor Books on 'The Geek Feminist Revolution.' This was an exciting book to pitch and is proving to be a lot of fun to put together.
With the coming of television, and the knowledge of how it could be used to seduce voters, the old political values disappeared. Something new, murky, undefined started to rise from the mists.
I think the narrative of people being caught between two cultures as immigrants is very harmful. It's exclusionary. It essentially tries to argue that some Americans are more real than others.
I grew up treating a life as a writer as a career in letters, one devoted to many kinds of writing. And so it seemed normal to study both fiction writing and the literary essay as an undergrad.
The reality is that much of the stuff you see in film, television, comics, and children's cartoons got its start inside the inspired, disruptive halls of science-fiction and fantasy literature.
Writers are naturally obsessed with books, the tangible artifacts of their labor. Even beyond the text, I love the physicality of books, the possibilities presented by their substance and form.
I’m going to check the world’s best source for spawning new urban legends, the Internet. What, you thought I couldn’t even type? The Web is just another threshold between one world and another.
I became a horror fan during the early 1960s, back when Hammer was putting out their groundbreaking 'Dracula' series with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, and grew up watching 'Dark Shadows.'
For the professional writer, stories must be presented as a series of individual scenes, each one dramatized with dialogue and telling descriptions of who is present and what they're all doing.