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The Search For Pleasure Is Circular, Repetitive, Atemporal. The Variety Seeking Of The Spectator, The Thrill Hunter, The Sexually Promiscuous, Always Ends In The Same Place. It Has An End. It Comes To The End And Has To Start Over. It Is Not A Journey And Return, But A Closed Cycle, A Locked Room, A Cell.

-Ursula K. Le Guin

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The Search For Pleasure

Ursula K. Le Guin

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The Search For Pleasure Is Circular, Repetitive, Atemporal. The Variety Seeking Of The Spectator, The Thrill Hunter, The Sexually Promiscuous, Always Ends In The Same Place. It Has An End. It Comes To The End And Has To Start Over. It Is Not A Journey And Return, But A Closed Cycle, A Locked Room, A Cell.

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Injustice Makes The Rules, And Courage Breaks Them.

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Can True Function Arise From Basic Dysfunction?

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

You Can’t Crush Ideas By Suppressing Them. You Can Only Crush Them By Ignoring Them. By Refusing To Think, Refusing To Change.

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.

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True Understanding Is The Spur Of Genius

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Take The Tale In Your Teeth, Then, And Bite Till The Blood Runs, Hoping It's Not Poison.

If Success In Selling Is My Primary Interest, I Am Not Primarily A Writer, But A Salesperson. If I Teach Success In Selling As The Writer's Primary Objective, I Am Not Teaching Writing; I'm Teaching, Or Pretending To Teach, The Production And Marketing Of A Commodity.

What She Needs, At Least One Thing She Needs, Is Companionship. After All Why Should She Eat? Who Needs Her To Be Alive? What We Call Psychosis Is Sometimes Simply Realism. But Human Beings Can't Live On Realism Alone.

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.

It Is Useless Work That Darkens The Heart.

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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.

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

Artists Are People Who Are Not At All Interested In The Facts - Only In The Truth.

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.

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.

Without War There Are No Heroes. What Harm Would That Be? Oh, Lavinia, What A Woman's Question That Is.

What The Brain Does By Itself Is Infinitely More Fascinating And Complex Than Any Response It Can Make To Chemical Stimulation.

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.

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.

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There's A Point, Around The Age Of 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.

Rest Of Your Life

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

There's Nothing Wrong With Me...except Acute Chronic Fear.

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The King Was Pregnant.

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

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

Between Thought And Spoken Word Is A Gap Where Intention Can Enter, The Symbol Be Twisted Aside, And The Lie Come To Be.

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Truth Is A Matter Of The Imagination.

If Science Fiction Is The Mythology Of Modern Technology, Then Its Myth Is Tragic.

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

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

A Man Does Not Make His Destiny: He Accepts It Or Denies It.

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If One Believes That Words Are Acts, As I Do, Then One Must Hold Writers Responsible For What Their Words Do.

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Any Artist Must Expect To Work Amid The Total, Rational Indifference Of Everybody Else To Their Work, For Years, Perhaps For Life.

...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.

Morning Comes Whether You Set The Alarm Or Not.

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.

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.

... The Habit Of Literature [is] The Best Defense Against Believing The Half-truths Of Ideologues And The Lies Of Demagogues.

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

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.

And I Speak Of Spiritual Suffering! Of People Seeing Their Talent, Their Work, Their Lives Wasted. Of Good Minds Submitting To Stupid Ones. Of Strength And Courage Strangled By Envy, Greed For Power, Fear Of Change. Change Is Freedom, Change Is Life

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.

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

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.

In The Tale, In The Telling, We Are All One Blood. Take The Tale In Your Teeth, Then, And Bite Till The Blood Runs, Hoping It's Not Poison; And We Will All Come To The End Together, And Even To The Beginning: Living, As We Do, In The Middle.

I Certainly Wasn't Happy. Happiness Has To Do With Reason, And Only Reason Earns It. What I Was Given Was The Thing You Can't Earn, And Can't Keep, And Often Don't Even Recognize At The Time; I Mean Joy.

While We Read A Novel, We Are Insane—bonkers. We Believe In The Existence Of People Who Aren't There, We Hear Their Voices... Sanity Returns (in Most Cases) When The Book Is Closed.

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

The Backside Of Heroism Is Often Rather Sad; Women And Servants Know That. They Know Also That The Heroism May Be No Less Real For That. But Achievement Is Smaller Than Men Think. What Is Large Is The Sky, The Earth, The Sea, The Soul.

What Is An Anarchist? One Who, Choosing, Accepts The Responsibility Of Choice.

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

Desire For Power

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

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

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

Stories Are What Death Thinks He Puts An End To. He Can't Understand That They End In Him, But They Don't End With Him.

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

Suffering Is Dysfunctional, Except As A Bodily Warning Against Danger. Psychologically And Socially It's Merely Destructive.

Grieving, Like Being Blind, Is A Strange Business; You Have To Learn How To Do It. We Seek Company In Mourning, But After The Early Bursts Of Tears, After The Praises Have Been Spoken, And The Good Days Remembered, And The Lament Cried, And The Grave Closed, There Is No Company In Grief. It Is A Burden Borne Alone.

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

What Is More Arrogant Than Honesty?

We Have Inhabited Both The Actual And The Imaginary Realms For A Long Time. But We Don't Live In Either Place The Way Our Parents Or Ancestors Did. Enchantment Alters With Age, And With The Age. We Know A Dozen Arthurs Now, All Of Them True. The Shire Changed Irrevocably Even In Bilbo's Lifetime. Don Quixote Went Riding Out To Argentina And Met Jorge Luis Borges There. Plus C'est La Même Chose, Plus ça Change.

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.

The Light Is The Left Hand Of Darkness.

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

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.

Life Goes On, Even If Two-headed And Glowing Faintly In The Dark.

Even In The Obscure Vast History Of A Planet The Time It Takes To Make A Forest Counts. It Takes A While. And Not Every Planet Can Do It; It Is No Common Effect, That Tangling Of The Sun's First Cool Light In The Shadow And Complexity Of Innumberable Wind-stirred Branches.

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.

Belief In The Lie Is The Life Of The Lie.

To Make A Thief, Make An Owner; To Create Crime, Create Laws.

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.

I Do Not Care What Comes After; I Have Seen The Dragons On The Wind Of Morning.

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.

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.

Fantasy Is Not Antirational, But Pararational; Not Realistic But Surrealistic, A Heightening Of Reality. In Freud's Terminology, It Employs Primary Not Secondary Process Thinking. It Employs Archetypes Which, As Jung Warned Us, Are Dangerous Things. Fantasy Is Nearer To Poetry, To Mysticism, And To Insanity Than Naturalistic Fiction Is. It Is A Wilderness, And Those Who Go There Should Not Feel Too Safe.

We Read Books To Find Out Who We Are. What Other People, Real Or Imaginary, Do And Think And Feel... Is An Essential Guide To Our Understanding Of What We Ourselves Are And May Become.

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

Revolution Is Our Obligation: Our Hope Of Evolution.

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 Sunlights Differ, But There Is Only One Darkness.

Manhood Is Patience. Mastery Is Nine Time Patience

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.

What Is Love Of One's Country; Is It Hate Of One's Uncountry? Then It's Not A Good Thing.

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

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

Most Civilisations, Perhaps, Look Shinier In General Terms And From Several Light-years Away.

Have You Never Thought How Danger Must Surround Power As Shadow Does Light?

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

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.

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

Changing Your Life

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

It Was Easy To Share When There Was Enough, Even Barely Enough, To Go Round. But When There Was Not Enough? Then Force Entered In; Might Making Right; Power, And Its Tool, Violence, And Its Most Devoted Ally, The Averted Eye.

In War Everybody Is A Prisoner.

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.

In The Airport, Luggage-laden People Rush Hither And Yon Through Endless Corridors, Like Souls To Each Of Whom The Devil Has Furnished A Different, Inaccurate Map Of The Escape Route From Hell.

The Thing About Working With Time, Instead Of Against It, He Thought, Is That It Is Not Wasted. Even Pain Counts.

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.

O Foolish Writer. Now Moves. Even In Storytime, Dreamtime, Once-upon-a-time, Now Isn't Then.

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?

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

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.

Sometimes I Not Only Stand There And Take It, I Even Smile At Them And Say I'm Sorry. When I Feel That Smile Coming Onto My Face, I Wish I Could Take My Face Off And Stamp On It.

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

I Was In Too Much Haste, And Now Have No Time Left. I Traded All The Sunlight And The Cities And The Distant Lands For A Handful Of Power, For A Shadow, For The Dark.

Age And Illness Made One A Dualist

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.

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

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

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.

Love Does Not Obey The Mind, And Turns To Hate When Forced.

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!

If You Deny Any Affinity With Another Person Or Kind Of Person, If You Declare It To Be Wholly Different From Yourself - As Men Have Done To Women, And Class Has Done To Class, And Nation Has Done To Nation - You May Hate It Or Deify It; But In Either Case You Have Denied Its Spiritual Equality And Its Human Reality. You Have Made It Into A Thing, To Which The Only Possible Relationship Is A Power Relationship. And Thus You Have Fatally Impoverished Your Own Reality.

Even A Poet Cannot Get Everything Right.

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

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

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.

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.

What Goes Too Long Unchanged Destroys Itself.

No Matter How Successful, Beloved, Influential Her Work Was, When A Woman Author Dies, Nine Times Out Of Ten, She Gets Dropped From The Lists, The Courses, The Anthologies, While The Men Get Kept. ... If She Had The Nerve To Have Children, Her Chances Of Getting Dropped Are Higher Still. ... So 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.

He Was Appalled By The Examination System, When It Was Explained To Him, He Could Not Imagine A Greater Detterent To The Natural Wish To Learn Than This Pattern Of Cramming In Information And Disgorging It On Demand.

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

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

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

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

I Always Wondered Why The Makers Leave Housekeeping And Cooking Out Of Their Tales. Isn't It What All The Great Wars And Battles Are Fought For -- So That At Day's End A Family May Eat Together In A Peaceful House?

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

She Obeys Me, But Only Because She Wants To. It's The Only Justification For Obedience, Ged Observed.

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.

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.

Love's Just One Of The Ways Through, And It Can Go Wrong, And Miss. Pain Never Misses. But Therefore We Don't Have Much Choice About Enduring It! We Will, Whether We Want To Or Not.

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

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.

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

Sometimes You Must Go Against The Wheel's Turn.

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.

To Hear, One Must Be Silent.

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

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.

There Are Two Kinds Of Knowledge, Local And Universal.

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.

In Art, 'good Enough' Is Not Good Enough.

Not Good Enough

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.

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.

Absolute Freedom Is Absolute Responsibility.

Absolute Freedom

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.

Now Perhaps An Excessive Dread Of Overpopulation--overcrowding--reflects Not An Outward Reality, But An Inward State Of Mind. If You Feel Overcrowded When You're Not, What Does That Mean? Maybe That You're Afraid Of Human Contact--of Being Close To People, Of Being Touched.

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

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

By And Large Books Are Mankind's Best Invention.

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.

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.

Literacy Is So You Can Read The Operating Instructions.

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

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.

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

My World, My Earth Is A Ruin. A Planet Spoiled By The Human Species. We Multiplied And Fought And Gobbled Until There Was Nothing Left, And Then We Died. We Controlled Neither Appetite Nor Violence; We Did Not Adapt. We Destroyed Ourselves. But We Destroyed The World First.

The Machine Conceals The Machinations.

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

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.

The Trouble Is That We Have A Bad Habit, Encouraged By Pedants And Sophisticates, Of Considering Happiness As Something Rather Stupid. Only Pain Is Intellectual, Only Evil Interesting. This Is The Treason Of The Artist: A Refusal To Admit The Banality Of Evil And The Terrible Boredom Of Pain.

Dragons Are More Dangerous, And A Good Deal Commoner, Than Bears. Fantasy Is Nearer To Poetry, To Mysticism, And To Insanity Than Naturalistic Fiction Is. It Is A Real Wilderness, And Those Who Go There Should Not Feel Too Safe.

You Are All In Jail. Each Alone, Solitary, With A Heap Of What He Owns. You Live In Prison, Die In Prison. It Is All I Can See In Your Eyes - The Wall, The Wall!

The End Justifies The Means. But What If There Never Is An End? All We Have Is Means.

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

I Do Try To Separate My Personal Activism - Showing Up At A Demonstration Or Something - From What I Write.

It Did Not Matter, After All. He Was Only One Man. One Man's Fate Is Not Important. "if It Is Not, What Is?" He Could Not Endure Those Remembered Words.

I Have Told The Story I Was Asked To Tell. I Have Closed It, As So Many Stories Close, With A Joining Of Two People. What Is One Man's And One Woman's Love And Desire, Against The History Of Two Worlds, The Great Revolutions Of Our Lifetimes, The Hope, The Unending Cruelty Of Our Species? A Little Thing. But A Key Is A Little Thing, Next To The Door It Opens. If You Lose The Key, The Door May Never Be Unlocked. It Is In Our Bodies That We Lose Or Begin Our Freedom, In Our Bodies That We Accept Or End Our Slavery. So I Wrote This Book For My Friend, With Whom I Have Lived And Will Die Free.

To Oppose Something Is To Maintain It.

Law Of Attraction

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.

I Think Hard Times Are Coming When We Will Be Wanting The Voices Of Writers Who Can See Alternatives To How We Live Now And Can See Through Our Fear-stricken Society And Its Obsessive Technologies To Other Ways Of Being, And Even Imagine Some Real Grounds For Hope. We Will Need Writers Who Can Remember Freedom. Poets, Visionaries-the Realists Of A Larger Reality.

Crankish Attacks On The Freedom To Read Are Common At Present. When Backed And Coordinated By Organized Groups, They Become Sinister.

A Panda Walks Into A Tea Room And Ordered A Salad And Ate It. Then It Pulled Out A Pistol, Shot The Man In The Next Table Dead, And Walked Out. Everyone Rushed After It, Shouting "stop! Stop! Why Did You Do That?" "becuase I Am A Panda," Said The Panda. "that's What Pandas Do. If You Don't Believe Me, Look In The Dictionary." So They Looked In The Dictionary And Sure Enough They Found Panda: Racoon-like Animal Of Asia. Eats Shoots And Leaves.

This Is The Treason Of The Artist: A Refusal To Admit The Banality Of Evil And The Terrible Boredom Of Pain.

Belief Is The Wound That Knowledge Heals.

Science Fiction Is Not Prescriptive; It Is Descriptive.

Science Fiction

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