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He Had Grown Up In A Country Run By Politicians Who Sent The Pilots To Man The Bombers To Kill The Babies To Make The World Safer For Children To Grow Up In.

-Ursula K. Le Guin

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He Had Grown Up

Ursula K. Le Guin

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He Had Grown Up In A Country Run By Politicians Who Sent The Pilots To Man The Bombers To Kill The Babies To Make The World Safer For Children To Grow Up In.

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There Was A Wall. It Did Not Look Important. It Was Built Of Uncut Rocks Roughly Mortared. An Adult Could Look Right Over It, And Even A Child Could Climb It. Where It Crossed The Roadway, Instead Of Having A Gate It Degenerated Into Mere Geometry, A Line, An Idea Of Boundary. But The Idea Was Real. It Was Important. For Seven Generations There Had Been Nothing In The World More Important Than That Wall. Like All Walls It Was Ambiguous, Two-faced. What Was Inside It And What Was Outside It Depended Upon Which Side Of It You Were On.

It Is Yin And Yang. Light Is The Left Hand Of Darkness ... How Did It Go? Light, Dark. Fear, Courage. Cold, Warmth. Female, Male. It Is Yourself ... Both And One. A Shadow On Snow.

When In The Land Of Property Think Like A Propertarian. Dress Like One, Eat Like One, Act Like One, Be One.

The Pornography Of Violence Of Course Far Exceeds, In Volume And General Acceptance, Sexual Pornography, In This Puritan Land Of Ours. Exploiting The Apocalypse, Selling The Holocaust, Is A Pornography. For The Ultimate Selling Job On Ultimate Violence One Must Read Those Works Of Fiction Issued By Our Government As Manuals Of Civil Defense, In Which You Learn That There's Nothing To Be Afraid Of If You've Stockpiled Lots Of Dried Fruit.

A Man Who Doesn't Detest A Bad Government Is A Fool. And If There Were Such A Thing As A Good Government On Earth, It Would Be A Great Joy To Serve It.

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.

The Earth Is Beautiful, And Bright, And Kindly, But That Is Not All. The Earth Is Also Terrible, And Dark, And Cruel. The Rabbit Shrieks Dying In The Green Meadows. The Mountains Clench Their Great Hands Full Of Hidden Fire. There Are Sharks In The Sea, And There Is Cruelty In Men's Eyes.

When You Light A Candle, You Also Cast A Shadow.

...fiction Is Made Out Of The Writer's Experience, His Whole Life From Infancy On, Everything He's Thought And Done And Seen And Read And Dreamed. But Experience Isn't Something You Go And Get - It's A Gift, And The Only Prerequisite For Receiving It Is That You Be Open To It. A Closed Soul Can Have The Most Immense Adventures, Go Through A Civil War Or A Trip To The Moon, And Have Nothing To Show For All That "experience"; Whereas The Open Soul Can Do Wonders With Nothing.

One Man May As Easily Destroy, As Govern: Be King Or Anti-king.

The Creative Adult Is The Child Who Has Survived.

The Future Has Become Uninhabitable. Such Hopelessness Can Arise, I Think, Only From An Inability To Face The Present, To Live In The Present, To Live As A Responsible Being Among Other Beings In This Sacred World Here And Now, Which Is All We Have, And All We Need, To Found Our Hope Upon.

Elegance Is A Small Price To Pay For Enlightenment, And I Was Glad To Pay It.

If You See A Whole Thing - It Seems That It's Always Beautiful. Planets, Lives... But Up Close A World's All Dirt And Rocks. And Day To Day, Life's A Hard Job, You Get Tired, You Lose The Pattern.

Everything Gives Way Before The Recurring Torment And Festivity Of Passion.

Sleeping People Are So Remote.... Right Here, But Out Of Communication. That's What Strikes Humans As Uncanny About Sleep. Its Utter Privacy. The Sleeper Turns His Back On Everyone.

For Fantasy Is True, Of Course. It Isn't Factual, But It Is True. Children Know That. Adults Know It Too, And That Is Precisely Why Many Of Them Are Afraid Of Fantasy. They Know That Its Truth Challenges, Even Threatens, All That Is False, All That Is Phony, Unnecessary, And Trivial In The Life They Have Let Themselves Be Forced Into Living. They Are Afraid Of Dragons, Because They Are Afraid Of Freedom.

Yet We Were Rescued By That Fancy, And Saved By A Myth.

A Moral Choice In Its Basic Terms Appears To Be A Choice That Favors Survival: A Choice Made In Favor Of Life.

The Fish In The Creek Said Nothing. Fish Never Do. Few People Know What Fish Think About Injustice, Or Anything Else.

It Is Not Human To Be Without Shame And Without Desire.

Reason Is A Faculty Far Larger Than Mere Objective Force. When Either The Political Or The Scientific Discourse Announces Itself As The Voice Of Reason, It Is Playing God, And Should Be Spanked And Stood In The Corner.

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.

Who Knows A Man's Name, Holds That Man's Life In His Keeping. Thus To Ged, Who Had Lost Faith In Himself, Vetch Had Given Him That Gift That Only A Friend Can Give, The Proof Of Unshaken, Unshakeable Trust.

Lying Is The Misuse Of Language. We Know That. We Need To Remember That It Works The Other Way Round Too. Even With The Best Intentions, Language Misused, Language Used Stupidly, Carelessly, Brutally, Language Used Wrongly, Breeds Lies, Half-truths, Confusion. In That Sense You Can Say That Grammar Is Morality. And It Is In That Sense That I Say A Writer's First Duty Is To Use Language Well.

There Are Souls, He Thought, Whose Umbilicus Has Never Been Cut. They Never Got Weaned From The Universe. They Do Not Understand Death As An Enemy; They Look Forward To Rotting And Turning Into Humus.

My Great-aunt. . . . Said Nobody Under 18 Had Any Business Reading Dickens. . . . She Was Right.

As You See, I Bear Some Resentment And Some Scars From The Years Of Anti-genre Bigotry. My Own Fiction, Which Moves Freely Around Among Realism, Magical Realism, Science Fiction, Fantasy Of Various Kinds, Historical Fiction, Young Adult Fiction, Parable, And Other Subgenres, To The Point Where Much Of It Is Ungenrifiable, All Got Shoved Into The Sci Fi Wastebasket Or Labeled As Kiddilit - Subliterature.

The Hunger Of A Dragon Is Slow To Wake, But Hard To Sate.

Sanity Returns (in Most Cases) When The Book Is Closed.

As A Writer You Are Free. You Are About The Freest Person That Ever Was. Your Freedom Is What You Have Bought With Your Solitude, Your Loneliness. You Are In The Country Where You Make Up The Rules, The Laws. You Are Both Dictator And Obedient Populace. It Is A Country Nobody Has Ever Explored Before. It Is Up To You To Make The Maps, To Build The Cities. Nobody Else In The World Can Do It, Or Ever Could Do It, Or Ever Will Be Able To Do It Again.

There Is A Limited Number Of Plots. There Is No Limit To The Number Of Stories.

Virginity Is Now A Mere Preamble Or Waiting Room To Be Got Out Of As Soon As Possible; It Is Without Significance.

We Sleep Researchers Like Cats, You Know; They Sleep A Lot!

I Doubt That The Imagination Can Be Suppressed. If You Truly Eradicated It In A Child, He Would Grow Up To Be An Eggplant.

By Such Literalism, Fundamentalism, Religions Betrayed The Best Intentions Of Their Founders. Reducing Thought To Formula, Replacing Choice By Obedience, These Preachers Turned The Living Word Into Dead Law.

My Imagination Makes Me Human And Makes Me A Fool; It Gives Me All The World, And Exiles Me From It.

In War Everybody Is A Prisoner.

Oh, Never And Forever Aren't For Mortals, Love. But We Won't Be Parted Till I Know It's Right That We Part.

We Live In Capitalism, Its Power Seems Inescapable - But Then, So Did The Divine Right Of Kings. Any Human Power Can Be Resisted And Changed By Human Beings. Resistance And Change Often Begin In Art. Very Often In Our Art, The Art Of Words.

A Profound Love Between Two People Involves, After All, The Power And Chance Of Doing Profound Hurt.

Public Speaking Is Done In The Public Tongue, The National Or Tribal Language; And The Language Of Our Tribe Is The Men's Language. Of Course Women Learn It. We're Not Dumb. If You Can Tell Margaret Thatcher From Ronald Reagan, Or Indira Gandhi From General Somoza, By Anything They Say, Tell Me How. This Is A Man's World, So It Talks A Man's Language.

Excess Is Excrement, ... Excrement Retained In The Body Is A Poison.

The Pornography Of Violence Of Course Far Exceeds, In Volume And General Acceptance, Sexual Pornography, In This Puritan Land Of Ours.

Science Fiction Properly Conceived, Like All Serious Fiction, However Funny, Is A Way Of Trying To Describe What Is In Fact Going On, What People Actually Do And Feel, How People Relate To Everything Else In This Vast Sack, This Belly Of The Universe, This Womb Of Things To Be And Tomb Of Things That Were, This Unending Story.

The Historic Function Of A Senator From Oregon Is To Drive All The Other Senators Mad.

All Knowledge Is Partial, Infinitesimally Partial. Reason Is A Net Thrown Out Into An Ocean. What Truth It Brings In Is A Fragment, A Glimpse, A Scintillation Of The Whole Truth.

It Is Hard To Swear When Sex Is Not Dirty And Blasphemy Does Not Exist.

To Learn A Belief Without The Belief Is To Sing A Song Without The Tune.

It Is No Secret. All Power Is One In Source And End, I Think. Years And Distances, Stars And Candles, Water And Wind And Wizardry, The Craft In A Man's Hand And The Wisdom In A Tree's Root: They All Arise Together. My Name, And Yours, And The True Name Of The Sun, Or A Spring Of Water, Or An Unborn Child, All Are Syllables Of The Great Word That Is Very Slowly Spoken By The Shining Of The Stars. There Is No Other Power. No Other Name.

Safety Lies In Catering To The In-group. We Are Not All Brave. All I Would Ask Of Writers Who Find It Hard To Question The Universal Validity Of Their Personal Opinions And Affiliations Is That They Consider This: Every Group We Belong To - By Gender, Sex, Race, Religion, Age - Is An In-group, Surrounded By An Immense Out-group, Living Next Door And All Over The World, Who Will Be Alive As Far Into The Future As Humanity Has A Future. That Out-group Is Called Other People. It Is For Them That We Write.

What You Love, You Will Love. What You Undertake You Will Complete. You Are A Fulfiller Of Hope; You Are To Be Relied On. But Seventeen Years Give Little Armor Against Despair...consider, Arren. To Refuse Death Is To Refuse Life.

Success Is Somebody Else's Failure. Success Is The American Dream We Can Keep Dreaming Because Most People In Most Places, Including Thirty Million Of Ourselves, Live Wide Awake In The Terrible Reality Of Poverty.

The Wise Needn't Ask, The Fool Asks In Vain.

There Is No Kingdom Like The Forests.

Manipulated, One Manipulates Others.

If Your Voice Is Heard By More People Because You've Earned Some Kind Of Name And Fame, Your Silence On An Issue Of Urgent Moral Importance Is Even More Of A Betrayal. Privilege Is Obligation.

To Oppose Something Is To Maintain It... You Must Go Somewhere Else; You Must Have Another Goal; Then You Walk A Different Road.

That I Was Not Dueling With The King, But Trying To Communicate With Him, Was Itself An Incommunicable Fact.

It's A Rare Gift, To Know Where You Need To Be, Before You've Been To All The Places You Don't Need To Be.

Writers Are Egotists. All Artists Are. They Can’t Be Altruists And Get Their Work Done. And Writers Love To Whine About The Solitude Of The Author’s Life, And Lock Themselves Into Cork-lined Rooms Or Droop Around In Bars In Order To Whine Better. But Although Most Writing Is Done In Solitude, I Believe That It Is Done, Like All The Arts, For An Audience. That Is To Say, With An Audience. All The Arts Are Performance Arts, Only Some Of Them Are Sneakier About It Than Others.

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.

Much Arrogance Is Necessary Equipment For An Artist, I Think. Not Sufficient, But Necessary. It Carries One Across The Gaps.

Age And Illness Made One A Dualist

I Had Forgotten How Much Light There Is In The World, Till You Gave It Back To Me.

One Of The Things [fiction] Does Is Lead You To Recognize What You Did Not Know Before.

There Are Very Real Differences Between Science Fiction And Realistic Fiction, Between Horror And Fantasy, Between Romance And Mystery. Differences In Writing Them, In Reading Them, In Criticizing Them. Vive Les Différences! They're What Gives Each Genre Its Singular Flavor And Savor, Its Particular Interest For The Reader - And The Writer.

Change Is Freedom, Change Is Life. It's Always Easier Not To Think For Oneself. Find A Nice Safe Hierarchy And Settle In. Don't Make Changes, Don't Risk Disapproval, Don't Upset Your Syndics. It's Always Easiest To Let Yourself Be Governed. There's A Point, Around Age Twenty, When You Have To Choose Whether To Be Like Everybody Else The Rest Of Your Life, Or To Make A Virtue Of Your Peculiarities. Those Who Build Walls Are Their Own Prisoners. I'm Going To Go Fulfil My Proper Function In The Social Organism. I'm Going To Go Unbuild Walls.

To Me The Female Principle Is, Or At Least Historically Has Been, Basically Anarchic. It Values Order Without Constraint, Rule By Custom Not By Force. It Has Been The Male Who Enforces Order, Who Constructs Power Structures, Who Makes, Enforces, And Breaks Laws.

What Is Love Of One's Country; Is It Hate Of One's Uncountry? Then It's Not A Good Thing. Is It Simply Self-love? That's A Good Thing, But One Musn't Make A Virtue Of It, Or A Profession...insofar As I Love Life, I Love [my Country], But That Sort Of Love Does Not Have A Boundary-line Of Hate. And Beyond That, I Am Ignorant, I Hope.

Civilized Man Says: I Am Self, I Am Master, All The Rest Is Other--outside, Below, Underneath, Subservient. I Own, I Use, I Explore, I Exploit, I Control. What I Do Is What Matters. What I Want Is What Matter Is For. I Am That I Am, And The Rest Is Women & Wilderness, To Be Used As I See Fit.

Absolute Freedom Is Absolute Responsibility.

Absolute Freedom

So The First Step Out Of Childhood Is Made All At Once, Without Looking Before Or Behind, Without Caution, And Nothing Held In Reserve.

The Notion That A Story Has A Message Assumes That It Can Be Reduced To A Few Abstract Words, Neatly Summarized In A School Or College Examination Paper Or A Brisk Critical Review.

A Person Who Believes, As She Did, That Things Fit: That There Is A Whole Of Which One Is A Part, And That In Being A Part One Is Whole: Such A Person Has No Desire Whatever, At Any Time, To Play God. Only Those Who Have Denied Their Being Yearn To Play At It.

Genre Fiction Was Looked At As A Ghetto, But I Wonder Now If Realist Fiction, Sealing Itself Off In The Glum Suburbs Of A Dysfunctional Society, Denying The Use Of Imagination, Was The Ghetto.

If You Evade Suffering, You Also Evade The Chance Of Joy.

There Have Been Great Societies That Did Not Use The Wheel, But There Have Been No Societies That Did Not Tell Stories.

If You Want Your Writing To Be Taken Seriously, Don't Marry And Have Kids, And Above All, Don't Die. But If You Have To Die, Commit Suicide. They Approve Of That.

Our Model Of The Cosmos Must Be As Inexhaustible As The Cosmos. A Complexity That Includes Not Only Duration But Creation, Not Only Being But Becoming, Not Only Geometry But Ethics. It Is Not The Answer We Are After, But Only How To Ask The Question.

Truth Is A Matter Of The Imagination.

Life Rises Out Of Death, Death Rises Out Of Life; In Being Opposite They Yearn To Each Other, They Give Birth To Each Other And Are Forever Reborn. And With Them, All Is Reborn, The Flower Of The Apple Tree, The Light Of The Stars. In Life Is Death. In Death Is Rebirth. What Then Is Life Without Death? Life Unchanging, Everlasting, Eternal?-what Is It But Death-death Without Rebirth?

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.

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.

At The Pit's Bottom Is No Anger.

If You're A Fiction Writer, Though, I Can Tell You How To Let People Talk Through You. Listen. Just Be Quiet, And Listen. Let The Character Talk. Don't Censor, Don't Control. Listen, And Write.

It Is Very Hard For Evil To Take Hold Of The Unconsenting Soul.

Sometimes A God Comes.... He Brings A New Way To Do A Thing, Or A New Thing To Be Done. A New Kind Of Singing, Or A New Kind Of Death. He Brings This Across The Bridge Between The Dream-time And The World-time. When He Has Done This, It Is Done. You Cannot Take Things That Exist In The World And Try To Drive Them Back Into The Dream, To Hold Them Inside The Dream With Walls And Pretenses. That Is Insanity. What Is, Is. There Is No Use Pretending, Now, That We Do Not Know How To Kill One Another.

Nobody Who Says, ‘i Told You So’ Has Ever Been, Or Will Ever Be, A Hero.

Little Mirrors Were Attached To The Front Of Their Cars, At Which They Glanced To See Where They Had Been; Then They Stared Ahead Again. I Had Thought That Only Beetles Had This Delusion Of Progress.

Fire And Fear, Good Servants, Bad Lords.

Ignorant Power Is A Bane!

It Is Useless Work That Darkens The Heart.

Greed Puts Out The Sun.

A Story Rises From The Springs Of Creation, From The Pure Will To Be; It Tells Itself; I Takes Its Own Course, Finds Its Own Way, Its Own Words; And The Writer's Job Is To Be Its Medium.

Legends Of Prediction Are Common Throughout The Whole Household Of Man. Gods Speak, Spirits Speak, Computers Speak. Oracular Ambiguity Or Statistical Probability Provides Loopholes, And Discrepancies Are Expunged By Faith.

The Place They Go Towards Is A Place Even Less Imaginable To Us Than The City Of Happiness. I Cannot Describe It At All. It Is Possible It Does Not Exist. But They Seem To Know Where They Are Going, The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.

You Cannot Blame Everything On The Enemy.

Meeting Writers Is Always So Disappointing. I Got Over Wanting To Meet Live Writers Quite A Long Time Ago. There Is This Terrific Book That Has Changed Your Life, And Then You Meet The Author, And He Has Shifty Eyes And Funny Shoes And He Won't Talk About Anything Except The Injustice Of The United States Income Tax Structure Toward People With Fluctuating Income, Or How To Breed Black Angus Cows, Or Something.

If A Book Were Written All In Numbers, It Would Be True. It Would Be Just. Nothing Said In Words Ever Came Out Quite Even. Things In Words Got Twisted And Ran Together, Instead Of Staying Straight And Fitting Together. But Underneath The Words, At The Center, Like The Center Of The Square, It All Came Out Even. Everything Could Change, Yet Nothing Would Be Lost. If You Saw The Numbers You Could See That, The Balance, The Pattern. You Saw The Foundations Of The World. And They Were Solid.

Ah, Genre. A Word Only A Frenchman Could Love.

Certainly The Effort To Remain Unchanged, Young, When The Body Gives So Impressive A Signal Of Change As The Menopause, Is Gallant; But It Is A Stupid, Self-sacrificial Gallantry, Better Befitting A Boy Of Twenty Than A Woman Of Forty-five Or Fifty. Let The Athletes Die Young And Laurel-crowned. Let The Soldiers Earn The Purple Hearts. Let Women Die Old, White-crowned, With Human Hearts.

What Is A Body That Casts No Shadow? Nothing, A Formlessness, Two-dimensional, A Comic-strip Character. If I Deny My Own Profound Relationship With Evil I Deny My Own Reality. I Cannot Do, Or Make; I Can Only Undo, Unmake.

I Write With All My Heart

I Have Decided That The Trouble With Print Is, It Never Changes Its Mind.

Art Is Action. The Way I Live My Life To Its Highest Degree Is By Writing, The Practice Of Art.

To Claim Power Over What You Do Not Understand Is Not Wise, Nor Is The End Of It Likely To Be Good.

At This Point, Realism Is Perhaps The Least Adequate Means Of Understanding Or Portraying The Incredible Realities Of Our Existence.

Belief In The Lie Is The Life Of The Lie.

There Is Neither Source Nor End, For All Things Are In The Center Of Time. As All The Stars May Be Reflected In A Round Raindrop Falling In The Night: So Too Do All The Stars Reflect The Raindrop. There Is Neither Darkness Nor Death, For All Things Are, In The Light Of The Moment, And Their End And Their Beginning Are One.

Honestly, Orthodoxy Concerns Me About As Much As It Concerns Your Average Jackrabbit. I Only Follow Rules That Take Me Where I Want To Go. If There Aren't Any Rules, I Make Up My Own And Follow Them Strictly.

To Learn Which Questions Are Unanswerable, And Not To Answer Them: This Skill Is Most Needful In Times Of Stress And Darkness.

The Quality Of The Will To Power Is, Precisely, Growth. Achievement Is Its Cancellation. To Be, The Will To Power Must Increase With Each Fulfillment, Making The Fulfillment Only A Step To A Further One. The Vaster The Power Gained The Vaster The Appetite For More.

The Only Thing That Makes Life Possible Is Permanent, Intolerable Uncertainty; Not Knowing What Comes Next.

The Artist Deals With What Cannot Be Said In Words.

Capitalism’s Grow-or-die Imperative Stands Radically At Odds With Ecology’s Imperative Of Interdependence And Limit. The Two Imperatives Can No Longer Coexist With Each Other; Nor Can Any Society Founded On The Myth That They Can Be Reconciled Hope To Survive. Either We Will Establish An Ecological Society Or Society Will Go Under For Everyone, Irrespective Of His Or Her Status.

Progress Means Nothing To Presence.

When The Genuine Myth Rises Into Consciousness, That Is Always Its Message. You Must Change Your Life.

Changing Your Life

Dead Anarchists Make Martyrs, You Know, And Keep Living For Centuries. But Absent Ones Can Be Forgotten.

It Is Of The Nature Of Idea To Be Communicated: Written, Spoken, Done. The Idea Is Like Grass. It Craves Light, Likes Crowds, Thrives On Crossbreeding, Grows Better For Being Stepped On.

As You Read A Book Word By Word And Page By Page, You Participate In Its Creation, Just As A Cellist Playing A Bach Suite Participates, Note By Note, In The Creation, The Coming-to-be, The Existence, Of The Music. And, As You Read And Re-read, The Book Of Course Participates In The Creation Of You, Your Thoughts And Feelings, The Size And Temper Of Your Soul.

The Literature Of The Emperor Penguin Is As Forbidding, As Inaccessible, As The Frozen Heart Of Antarctica Itself. Its Beauties May Be Unearthly, But They Are Not For Us.

No Society Can Change The Nature Of Existence. We Can't Prevent Suffering. This Pain And That Pain, Yes, But Not Pain. A Society Can Only Relieve Social Suffering, Unnecessary Suffering. The Rest Remains. The Root, The Reality.

Nothing Remains The Same From One Moment To The Next, You Can't Step Into The Same River Twice. Life--evolution--the Whole Universe Of Space/time, Matter/energy--existence Itself--is Essentially Change.

And He Began To See The Truth, That Ged Had Neither Lost Nor Won But, Naming The Shadow Of His Death With His Own Name, Had Made Himself Whole: A Man Who, Knowing His Whole True Self, Cannot Be Used Or Possessed By Any Power Other Than Himself, And Whose Life Therefore Is Lived For Life's Sake And Never In The Service Of Ruin, Or Pain, Or Hatred, Or The Dark.

Before The Moon I Am, What A Woman Is, A Woman Of Power, A Woman's Power, Deeper Than The Roots Of Trees, Deeper Than The Roots Of Islands, Older Than The Making, Older Than The Moon.

The Model Of Modern Western Civilization Is The Virus: The Pure Bit Of Information, Which Turns Its Environment Into Endless Reproductions Of Itself.

Love Is The True Condition Of Human Life.

Art Is Craft: All Art Is Always And Essentially A Work Of Craft: But In The True Work Of Art, Before The Craft And After It, Is Some Essential Durable Core Of Being, Which Is What The Craft Works On, And Shows, And Sets Free. The Statue In The Stone. How Does The Artist Find That, See It, Before It's Visible? That Is A Real Question.

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.

Great Artists Make The Roads; Good Teachers And Good Companions Can Point Them Out. But There Ain't No Free Rides, Baby. No Hitchhiking. And If You Want To Strike Out In Any New Direction — You Go Alone. With A Machete In Your Hand And The Fear Of God In Your Heart.

Virginity Is Now A Mere Preamble Or Waiting Room To Be Got Out Of As Soon As Possible; It Is Without Significance. Old Age Is Similarly A Waiting Room, Where You Go After Life's Over And Wait For Cancer Or A Stroke. The Years Before And After The Menstrual Years Are Vestigial: The Only Meaningful Condition Left To Women Is That Of Fruitfulness.

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.

You Can Go Home Again...so Long As You Understand That Home Is A Place Where You Have Never Been.

I Think The Mystery Of Art Lies In This, That Artists’ Relationship Is Essentially With Their Work — Not With Power, Not With Profit, Not With Themselves, Not Even With Their Audience.

To See That Your Life Is A Story While You're In The Middle Of Living It May Be A Help To Living It Well.

The Only Questions That Really Matter Are The Ones You Ask Yourself.

Asking Yourself Questions

All Or Nothing At All, The True Lover Says, And That's The Truth Of It. My Love Will Never Die, He Says. He Claims Eternity. And Rightly. How Can It Die When It's Life Itself? What Do We Know Of Eternity But The Glimpse We Get Of It When We Enter In That Bond?

The Reader Can't Take Much For Granted In A Fiction Where The Scenery Can Eat The Characters.

All Men Were Alien One To Another, At Times, Not Only Aliens.

Art And Entertainment Are The Same Thing, In That The More Deeply And Genuinely Entertaining A Work Is, The Better Art It Is. To Imply That Art Is Something Heavy And Solemn And Dull, And Entertainment Is Modest But Jolly And Popular, Is Neo-victorian Idiocy At Its Worst.

To Think That Realistic Fiction Is By Definition Superior To Imaginative Fiction Is To Think Imitation Is Superior To Invention.

See, The Thing Is, As A Writer You Are Free. You Are About The Freest Person That Ever Was. Your Freedom Is What You Have Bought With Your Solitude, Your Loneliness.

Art, Like Sex, Cannot Be Carried On Indefinitely Solo; After All, They Have The Same Enemy, Sterility.

The Menopause Is Probably The Least Glamorous Topic Imaginable; And This Is Interesting, Because It Is One Of The Very Few Topics To Which Cling Some Shreds And Remnants Of Taboo. A Serious Mention Of Menopause Is Usually Met With Uneasy Silence; A Sneering Reference To It Is Usually Met With Relieved Sniggers. Both The Silence And The Sniggering Are Pretty Sure Indications Of Taboo.

She Had Always Known That All Lives Are In Common, Rejoicing In Her Kinship To The Fish In The Tanks Of Her Laboratories, Seeking The Experience Of Existences Outside The Human Boundary.

Science Fiction - And The Correct Shortcut Is 'sf' - Uses Actual Scientific Facts Or Theories For The Source Ideas Or Framework Of The Story. It Has Some Scientific Content, However Speculative. If It Breaks A Law Of Physics, It Knows It's Doing So And Follows Up The Consequences. If It Invents A Society Of Aliens, It Does So With Some Respect For And Knowledge Of The Social Sciences And What You Might Call Social Probabilities. And Some Of It Is Literarily Self-aware Enough To Treat Its Metaphors As Metaphors.

I Don't Believe That A Writer 'gets' (takes Into The Head) An 'idea' (some Sort Of Mental Object) 'from' Somewhere, And Then Turns It Into Words, And Writes Them On Paper. At Least In My Experience, It Doesn't Work That Way. The Stuff Has To Be Transformed Into Oneself, It Has To Be Composted, Before It Can Grow Into A Story.

No Man, No Power, Can Bind The Action Of Wizardry Or Still The Words Of Power. For They Are The Very Words Of Making, And One Who Could Silence Them Could Unmake The World.

Even The Best Weapon Is An Unhappy Tool, Hateful To Living Things. So The Follower Of The Way Stays Away From It. Weapons Are Unhappy Tools, Not Chosen By Thoughtful People, To Be Used Only When There Is No Choice, And With A Calm, Still Mind, Without Enjoyment. To Enjoy Using Weapons Is To Enjoy Killing People, And To Enjoy Killing People Is To Lose Your Share In The Common Good. It Is Right That The Murder Of Many People Be Mourned And Lamented. It Is Right That A Victor In War Be Received With Funeral Ceremonies.

There Are Times When You Have To Speak Because Silence Is Betrayal.

To Break A Promise Is To Deny The Reality Of The Past. Therefore It Is To Deny The Hope Of A Real Future.

The Great Authors Share Their Souls With Us- "literally.

In The Tale, In The Telling, We Are All One Blood.

I Don't Want To Be A Propagandist, No Matter How Good The Cause. I Want To Tell Stories. It's Just That The Stories Have To Square With My Consciousness As A Woman And My Conscience As A Human Being.

There Are Things That Outweigh Comfort, Unless One Is An Old Woman Or A Cat.

He Had Grown Up In A Country Run By Politicians Who Sent The Pilots To Man The Bombers To Kill The Babies To Make The World Safer For Children To Grow Up In.

You Will Die. You Will Not Live Forever. Nor Will Any Man Nor Any Thing. Nothing Is Immortal. But Only To Us Is It Given To Know That We Must Die. And That Is A Great Gift: The Gift Of Selfhood. For We Have Only What We Know We Must Lose, What We Are Willing To Lose... That Selfhood Which Is Our Torment, And Our Treasure, And Our Humanity, Does Not Endure. It Changes; It Is Gone, A Wave On The Sea. Would You Have The Sea Grow Still And The Tides Cease, To Save One Wave, To Save Yourself?

The Danger In Trying To Do Good Is That The Mind Comes To Confuse The Intent Of Goodness With The Act Of Doing Things Well.

Darkness Is Only In The Mortal Eye, That Thinks It Sees, But Sees Not.

I Believe That All Novels, ... Deal With Character, And That It Is To Express Character – Not To Preach Doctrines, Sing Songs, Or Celebrate The Glories Of The British Empire, That The Form Of The Novel, So Clumsy, Verbose, And Undramatic, So Rich, Elastic, And Alive, Has Been Evolved ... The Great Novelists Have Brought Us To See Whatever They Wish Us To See Through Some Character. Otherwise They Would Not Be Novelists, But Poet, Historians, Or Pamphleteers.

In Many College English Courses The Words “myth” And “symbol” Are Given A Tremendous Charge Of Significance. You Just Ain’t No Good Unless You Can See A Symbol Hiding, Like A Scared Gerbil, Under Every Page. And In Many Creative Writing Course The Little Beasts Multiply, The Place Swarms With Them. What Does This Mean? What Does That Symbolize? What Is The Underlying Mythos? Kids Come Lurching Out Of Such Courses With A Brain Full Of Gerbils. And They Sit Down And Write A Lot Of Empty Pomposity, Under The Impression That That’s How Melville Did It.

The Airport Bookstore Did Not Sell Books, Only Bestsellers, Which Sita Dulip Cannot Read Without Risking A Severe Systemic Reaction.

The Old Knowledge Had Been Difficult But Not Distressing. It Had Been All Paradox And Myth, And It Had Made Sense. The New Knowledge Was All Fact And Reason, And It Made No Sense.

The Children Of The Revolution Are Always Ungrateful, And The Revolution Must Be Grateful That It Is So.

I'm Not A Quester Or A Searcher For The Truth. I Don't Really Think There Is One Answer, So I Never Went Looking For It. My Impulse Is Less Questing And More Playful. I Like Trying On Ideas And Ways Of Life And Religious Approaches. I'm Just Not A Good Candidate For Conversion.

In Our Loss And Fear We Craved The Acts Of Religion, The Ceremonies That Allow Us To Admit Our Helplessness, Our Dependence On The Great Forces We Do Not Understand.

You Must Not Change One Thing, One Pebble, One Grain Of Sand, Until You Know What Good And Evil Will Follow On That Act.

Nothing Is Yours. It Is To Use. It Is To Share. If You Will Not Share It, You Cannot Use It.

But It Doesn't Take A Thousand Men To Open A Door, My Lord." "it Might To Keep It Open.

The More Defensive A Society, The More Conformist.

There Are No Right Answers To Wrong Questions.

Asking Questions

Questions And Answers

Injustice Makes The Rules, And Courage Breaks Them.

The One Thing A Writer Has To Have Is A Pencil And Some Paper. That's Enough, So Long As She Knows That She And She Alone Is In Charge Of That Pencil, And Responsible, She And She Alone, For What It Writes On That Paper.

How Can People Be Anything But Ignorant When Knowledge Isn't Saved, Isn't Taught?

Well, We Think That Time "passes," Flows Past Us, But What If It Is We Who Move Forward, From Past To Future, Always Discovering The New? It Would Be A Little Like Reading A Book, You See. The Book Is All There, All At Once, Between Its Covers. But If You Want To Read The Story And Understand It, You Must Begin With The First Page, And Go Forward, Always In Order. So The Universe Would Be A Very Great Book, And We Would Be Very Small Readers.

Planets Were Very Large Places, On Any Scale But That Of The Spaces In Between Them.

Alone, No One Wins Freedom.

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.

If You Evade Suffering You Also Evade The Chance Of Joy. Pleasure You May Get, Or Pleasures, But You Will Not Be Fulfilled. You Will Not Know What It Is To Come Home.

Writing Makes No Noise, Except Groans, And It Can Be Done Everywhere, And It Is Done Alone.

We Need Writers Who Know The Difference Between The Production Of A Commodity And The Practice Of An Art.

Happiness Is Based On A Just Discrimination Of What Is Necessary, What Is Neither Necessary Nor Destructive, And What Is Destructive. In The Middle Category, However - That Of The Unnecessary But Undestructive, That Of Comfort, Luxury, Exuberance, Etc

Things Don't Have Purposes, As If The Universe Were A Machine, Where Every Part Has A Useful Function. What's The Function Of A Galaxy? I Don't Know If Our Life Has A Purpose And I Don't See That It Matters. What Does Matter Is That We're A Part. Like A Thread In A Cloth Or A Grass-blade In A Field. It Is And We Are. What We Do Is Like Wind Blowing On The Grass.

The Desire For Power Feeds Off Itself, Growing As It Devours.

Desire For Power

In Innocence There Is No Strength Against Evil, Said Sparrowhawk, A Little Wryly. But There Is Strength In It For Good.

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.

The World Is In Balance . To Light A Candle Is To Cast A Shadow.

To See A Candle's Light, One Must Take It Into A Dark Place. This Is The Same As To See The Good And Be Grateful, One Must Compare And Contrast It With Something Worse - Not Better!

Fake Realism Is The Escapist Literature Of Our Time. And Probably The Ultimate Escapist Reading Is That Masterpiece Of Total Unreality, The Daily Stock Market Report.

No, I Don't Mean Love, When I Say Patriotism. I Mean Fear. The Fear Of The Other. And Its Expressions Are Political, Not Poetical: Hate, Rivalry, Aggression.

What Else Can The Young Be? When You Are On The Bottom, You Must Organize From The Bottom Up

First Sentences Are Doors To Worlds.

Even In Merely Reading A Fairytale, We Must Let Go Our Daylight Convictions And Trust Ourselves To Be Guided By Dark Figures, In Silence; And When We Come Back, It May Be Very Hard To Describe Where We Have Been.

No Matter How Intelligent A Man Is, He Can't See What He Doesn't Know How To See.

Infinite Are The Arguments Of Mages.

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.

Go To Bed; Tired Is Stupid.

Fiction—and Poetry And Drama— Cleanse The Doors Of Perception.

The Law Of Evolution Is That The Strongest Survives!' 'yes, And The Strongest, In The Existence Of Any Social Species, Are Those Who Are Most Social. In Human Terms, Most Ethical...there Is No Strength To Be Gained From Hurting One Another. Only Weakness.

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