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It's The Self That Suffers, And There's A Place Where The Self--ceases. I Don't Know How To Say It. But I Believe That The Reality--the Truth That I Recognize In Suffering As I Don't In Comfort And Happiness--that The Reality Of Pain Is Not Pain. If You Can Get Through It. If You Can Endure It All The Way.

-Ursula K. Le Guin

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It's The Self That

Ursula K. Le Guin

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It's The Self That Suffers, And There's A Place Where The Self--ceases. I Don't Know How To Say It. But I Believe That The Reality--the Truth That I Recognize In Suffering As I Don't In Comfort And Happiness--that The Reality Of Pain Is Not Pain. If You Can Get Through It. If You Can Endure It All The Way.

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Where Does Your Soul Go, When You Die In Hell?

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Nothing Said In Words Ever Came Out Quite Even. Things In Words Got Twisted And Ran Together, Instead Of Staying Straight And Fitting Together.

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.

Distrust Everything I Say. I Am Telling The Truth.

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Greed Puts Out The Sun.

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The Story Is Not In The Plot But In The Telling.

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But Need Alone Is Not Enough To Set Power Free: There Must Be Knowledge.

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.

There Is Not Much You Can Say About A Baby Unless You Are Talking With Its Father Or Another Mother Or Nurse; Infants Are Not Part Of The Realm Of Ordinary Language, Talk Is Inadequate To Them As They Are Inadequate To Talk.

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

Desire For Power

Why Can I Never Set My Heart On A Possible Thing?

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

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.

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Science Fiction Is Not Predictive; It Is Descriptive.... Prediction Is The Business Of Prophets, Clairvoyants, And Futurologists. It Is Not The Business Of Novelists. A Novelist's Business Is Lying.... Open Your Eyes; Listen, Listen. That Is What The Novelists Say. But They Don't Tell You What You Will See And Hear. All They Can Tell You Is What They Have Seen And Heard, In Their Time In This World, A Third Of It Spent In Sleep And Dreaming, Another Third Of It Spent In Telling Lies.

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.

I Hope You Are Never Victims, But I Hope You Have No Power Over Other People.

Power Over Others

I Think What's Happening Is, It's All - Fantasy, Science Fiction, Ghosts, Trolls, Whatever - Finally Being Called, Being Admitted To Be Literature. The Way It Used To Be, Before The Realists And The Bloody Modernists Took Over.

...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.

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.

At The Pit's Bottom Is No Anger.

A Child Free From The Guilt Of Ownership And The Burden Of Economic Competition Will Grow Up With The Will To Do What Needs Doing And The Capacity For Joy In Doing It. It Is Useless Work That Darkens The Heart. The Delight Of The Nursing Mother, Of The Scholar, Of The Successful Hunter, Of The Good Cook, Of The Skilful Maker, Of Anyone Doing Needed Work And Doing It Well, - This Durable Joy Is Perhaps The Deepest Source Of Human Affection And Of Sociality As A Whole.

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.

What Is Life Without Incompatible Realities?

Truth Is A Matter Of The Imagination. The Soundest Fact May Fail Or Prevail In The Style Of Its Telling: Like That Singular Organic Jewel Of Our Seas, Which Grows Brighter As One Woman Wears It And, Worn By Another, Dulls And Goes To Dust.

Time Has Two Aspects. There Is The Arrow, The Running River, Without Which There Is No Change, No Progress, Or Direction, Or Creation. And There Is The Circle Or The Cycle, Without Which There Is Chaos, Meaningless Succession Of Instants, A World Without Clocks Or Seasons Or Promises.

In That Moment Ged Understood The Singing Of The Bird, And The Language Of The Water Falling In The Basin Of The Fountain, And The Shape Of The Clouds, And The Beginning And End Of The Wind That Stirred The Leaves; It Seemed To Him That He Himself Was A Word Spoken By The Sunlight.

When You Work In Form, Be It A Sonnet Or Villanelle Or Whatever, The Form Is There And You Have To Fill It. And You Have To Find How To Make That Form Say What You Want To Say. But What You Find, Always--i Think Any Poet Who's Worked In Form Will Agree With Me--is That The Form Leads You To What You Want To Say.

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.

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

Is It The Gods Who Set This Fire In Our Hearts, Or Do We Each Make Our Fierce Desire Into A God?

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!

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She'll Die.' 'aye. That's A Consequence Of Being Alive.

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If You Have To Find Devices To Coax Yourself To Stay Focused On Writing, Perhaps You Should Not Be Writing What You're Writing. And If This Lack Of Motivation Is A Constant Problem, Perhaps Writing Is Not Your Forte. I Mean, What Is The Problem? If Writing Bores You, That Is Pretty Fatal. If That Is Not The Case, But You Find That It Is Hard Going And It Just Doesn't Flow, Well, What Did You Expect? It Is Work; Art Is Work.

Revolution Is Our Obligation: Our Hope Of Evolution.

As A Kitten Does What All Other Kittens Do, So A Child Wants To Do What Other Children Do, With A Wanting That Is As Powerful As It Is Mindless. Since We Human Beings Have To Learn What We Do, We Have To Start Out That Way, But Human Mindfulness Begins Where That Wish To Be The Same Leaves Off.

Very Seldom Do You Come Upon A Space, A Time Like This, Between Act And Act, When You May Stop And Simply Be.

When I'm Writing I Don't Dream Much; It's Like The Dreaming Gets Used In The Writing.

My Real Children Starts Quietly, Then Suddenly Takes You On Two Roller-coaster Rides At Once, Swooping Dizzily Through A Double Panorama And Ending In A Sort Of Super Sophie's Choice. A Daring Tour De Force.

It Is Useless Work That Darkens The Heart.

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

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The Counsel Of The Dead Is Not Profitable To The Living.

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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.

It's The Self That Suffers, And There's A Place Where The Self--ceases. I Don't Know How To Say It. But I Believe That The Reality--the Truth That I Recognize In Suffering As I Don't In Comfort And Happiness--that The Reality Of Pain Is Not Pain. If You Can Get Through It. If You Can Endure It All The Way.

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.

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I Am No More Lonely Than The Loon On The Pond That Laughs So Loud.

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

I Don't Write Tracts, I Write Novels. I'm Not A Preacher, I'm A Fiction Writer.

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

In General She Had Found That The Main Drawback In Being A Man Was That Conversations Were Less Interesting.

I Write With All My Heart

What's Needed In This Case Is Conscious And Serious Practice In Hearing, And Using, And Being Used By, Other People's Voices.

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.

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Those Who Dislike Fantasy Are Very Often Equally Bored Or Repelled By Science. They Don't Like Either Hobbits, Or Quasars; They Don't Feel At Home With Them; They Don't Want Complexities, Remoteness. If There Is Any Such Connection, I'll Bet That It Is Basically An Aesthetic One

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.

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

We Live In Capitalism. Its Power Seems Inescapable. So Did The Divine Right Of Kings.

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

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Primitiveness And Civilization Are Degrees Of The Same Thing. If Civilization Has An Opposite, It Is War.

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.

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.

My Soul Is Ten Thousand Miles Wide And Extremely Invisibly Deep. It Is The Same Size As The Sea, And You Cannot, You Cannot Cram It Into Beer Cans And Fingernails And Stake It Out In Lots And Own It. It Will Drown You All And Never Even Notice.

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.

One Must Work With Time And Not Against It.

The Use Of Imaginative Fiction Is To Deepen Your Understanding Of Your World, And Your Fellow Men, And Your Own Feelings, And Your Destiny.

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.

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

Resistance And Change Often Begin In Art, And Very Often In Our Art - The Art Of Words.

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.

What Is More Arrogant Than Honesty?

The Light Is The Left Hand Of Darkness.

And Though I Came To Forget Or Regret All I Have Ever Done, Yet Would I Remember That Once I Saw The Dragons Aloft On The Wind At Sunset Above The Western Isles; And I Would Be Content.

When We're Done With It, We May Find—if It's A Good Novel—that We're A Bit Different From What We Were Before We Read It, That We Have Been Changed A Little, As If By Having Meet A New Face, Crossed A Street We've Never Crossed Before.

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.

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

Not Even Need And Love Can Defeat Fate.

What Good Is Power When You're Too Wise To Use It?

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

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.

From That Time Forth He Believed That The Wise Man Is One Who Never Sets Himself Apart From Other Living Things, Whether They Have Speech Or Not, And In Later Years He Strove Long To Learn What Can Be Learned, In Silence, From The Eyes Of Animals, The Flight Of Birds, The Great Slow Gestures Of Trees.

To Be Whole Is To Be Part; True Voyage Is Return.

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

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.

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

Almost Anything Carried To A Logical Extreme Becomes Depressing.

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

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.

It Is A Real Wilderness, And Those Who Go There Should Not Feel Too Safe.

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!

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.

Absolute Freedom Is Absolute Responsibility.

Absolute Freedom

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

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

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?

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

Any Human Power Can Be Resisted And Changed By Human Beings

Sometimes You Must Go Against The Wheel's Turn.

Sure, It's Simple, Writing For Kids... Just As Simple As Bringing Them Up.

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 Sit Down And You Do It, And You Do It, And You Do It, Until You Have Learned To Do It.

And I Needed A Rock. Something To Hold Onto, To Stand On. Something Solid. Because Everything Was Going Soft, Turning Into Mush, Into Marsh, Into Fog. Fog Closing In On All Sides. I Didn't Know Where I Was At All.

Part Of The Particular Interest And Beauty Of Science Fiction And Fantasy: Writer And Reader Collaborate In World-making.

Do You See, Arren, How An Act Is Not, As Young Men Think, Like A Rock That One Picks Up And Throws, And It Hits Or Misses, And That's The End Of It. When That Rock Is Lifted, The Earth Is Lighter; The Hand That Bears It Is Heavier. When It Is Thrown, The Circuits Of The Stars Respond, And Where It Strikes Or Falls The Universe Is Changed.

We Decided That It Was No Good Asking What Is The Meaning Of Life, Because Life Isn't An Answer, Life Is The Question, And You, Yourself, Are The Answer.

Meaning Of Life

I Am Living In A Nightmare, From Which From Time To Time I Wake In Sleep.

Can True Function Arise From Basic Dysfunction?

Genre Is A Useful Concept Only When Used Not Evaluatively But Descriptively.

But Now His Dry And Silent Grieving For His Lost Wife Must End, For There She Stood, The Fierce, Recalcitrant, And Fragile Stranger, Forever To Be Won Again.

I Suppose The Most Important Thing, The Heaviest Single Factor In One's Life, Is Whether One's Born Male Or Female. In Most Societies It Determines One's Expectations, Activities, Outlook, Ethics, Manners - Almost Everything. Vocabulary. Semiotic Usages. Clothing. Even Food. Women... Women Tend To Eat Less... It's Extremely Hard To Separate The Innate Differences From The Learned Ones. Even Where Women Participate Equally With Men In The Society, They Still After All Do All The Childbearing, And So Most Of The Child-rearing.

Men Who Fight Wars In Winter Don't Live Till Spring.

True Myths May Serve For Thousands Of Years As An Inexhaustible Source Of Intellectual Speculation, Religious Joy, Ethical Inquiry, And Artistic Renewal. The Real Mystery Is Not Destroyed By Reason. The Fake One Is. You Look At It And It Vanishes. You Look At The Blonde Hero-really Look-and He Turns Into A Gerbil. But You Look At Apollo, And He Looks Back At You. The Poet Rilke Looked At A Statue Of Apollo About Fifty Years Ago, And Apollo Spoke To Him. "you Must Change Your Life," He Said. When The True Myth Rises Into Consciousness, That Is Always Its Message. You Must Change Your Life.

All Knowledge Is Local, All Truth Is Partial. No Truth Can Make Another Truth Untrue. All Knowledge Is Part Of The Whole Knowledge. Once You Have Seen The Larger Pattern, You Cannot Go Back To Seeing The Part As The Whole.

They Can Send Death At Once, But Life Is Slower.

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

It's Probably Simply A Matter Of Temperament That I Never Stopped To Wonder If I Could "match" What I Had Done, Never Choked Off My Writing By Competing With Myself, Or With Anybody Else For That Matter. My Ambition Was Absolutely Centered On The Work Itself, Never On What It Would Bring Me, Or "who" It Would Make Me. I Never Cared About That At All.

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.

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.

Death And Life Are The Same Thing-like The Two Sides Of My Hand, The Palm And The Back. And Still The Palm And The Back Are Not The Same...they Can Be Neither Separated, Nor Mixed.

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.

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.

The Greatest Religious Problem Today Is How To Be Both A Mystic And A Militant; In Other Words How To Combine The Search For An Expansion Of Inner Awareness With Effective Social Action, And How To Feel One's True Identity In Both.

To Read And To Write. Some Writers Have To Be Told To Write. They Think Their Job Is To Meet Agents And Have Experiences And They Can Just Be Rich And Famous. Their Job Is To Write. Some Really Don't Realize That. And You Can't Write Unless You Read.

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.

The Borderline Between Prose And Poetry Is One Of Those Fog-shrouded Literary Minefields Where The Wary Explorer Gets Blown To Bits Before Ever Seeing Anything Clearly. It Is Full Of Barbed Wire And The Stumps Of Dead Opinions.

Prose And Poetry

There Are No Right Answers To Wrong Questions.

Asking Questions

Questions And Answers

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.

I Think There Is No Way To Write About Being Alone. To Write Is To Tell Something To Somebody To Communicate To Others. . . . Solitude Is Noncommunication, The Absence Of Others, The Presence Of A Self Sufficient To Itself.

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.

There's No Way To Use Power For Good.

Dreams Take Short Cuts.

Do You Know How To Read?" "no. It Is One Of The Black Arts." He Nodded. "but A Useful One," He Said.

Only In Silence The Word, Only In Dark The Light, Only In Dying Life: Bright The Hawk's Flight On The Empty Sky.

Despair Speaks Evenly, In A Quiet Voice.

Owning Is Owing, Having Is Hoarding.

Great Self-destruction Follows Upon Unfounded Fear.

Self Destruction

I Have Become Very Critical Of The Whole Book Award System And Could Preach On That Subject For Quite A While, But I Do Know What An Award Can Mean To A Writer Early In Her Career. It Can Give An Essential Validation.

We Read Books To Find Out Who We Are.

Self Understanding

Even A Poet Cannot Get Everything Right.

Writers Need To Learn Their Trade, And How To Negotiate The Increasingly Difficult Marketplace. The Trade Can Be Taught And Learned Just As The Craft Can. But A Workshop Where The Trade Is The Principal Focus Of Interest Is Not A Writing Workshop. It Is A Business Class.

Writers Have To Get Used To Launching Something Beautiful And Watching It Crash And Burn. They Also Have To Learn When To Let Go Control, When The Work Takes Off On Its Own And Flies, Farther Than They Ever Planned Or Imagined, To Places They Didn't Know They Knew.

To Be Oneself Is A Rare Thing, And A Great One.

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.

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.

Translation Is Entirely Mysterious. Increasingly I Have Felt That The Art Of Writing Is Itself Translating, Or More Like Translating Than It Is Like Anything Else. What Is The Other Text, The Original? I Have No Answer. I Suppose It Is The Source, The Deep Sea Where Ideas Swim, And One Catches Them In Nets Of Words And Swings Them Shining Into The Boat... Where In This Metaphor They Die And Get Canned And Eaten In Sandwiches.

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.

Growing Up During World War Ii Certainly Affected My Whole View Of Life, But I Hardly Know How, It Goes So Deep. What's Hard To Explain Now Is That, Though We Were Never Invaded, And Bombed Only Once And Ineffectively On The Coast Of Oregon, Everybody In The Country Was In That War. Everything We Did Was Influenced By It - Eating, Traveling, Dressing, Thinking - Everything In Daily Life.

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.

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.

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

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

To Exhibit The Perfect Uselessness Of Knowing The Answer To The Wrong Question.

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