The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.
If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.
My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world, and exiles me from it.
I talk about the gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.
When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.
The artist deals in what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
I do try to separate my personal activism – showing up at a demonstration or something – from what I write.
As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.
I don’t write tracts, I write novels. I’m not a preacher, I’m a fiction writer.
He is far too intelligent to become really cerebral.
I’ve got some gift for languages. You follow your gift. But Latin’s not easy.
I get a lot of moral guidance from reading novels, so I guess I expect my novels to offer some moral guidance, but they’re not blueprints for action, ever.
I don’t teach writing classes anymore, and I’m really glad I don’t, because I would feel very strange about telling people, ‘Go out there and be a writer, and make a living from it.’
Morning comes whether you set the alarm or not.
We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.
Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.
What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?
The children of the revolution are always ungrateful, and the revolution must be grateful that it is so.
It had never occurred to me before that music and thinking are so much alike. In fact you could say music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music.
There are no right answers to wrong questions.
The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.
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.
I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived.
Great artists make the roads; good teachers and good companions can point them out. But there ain’t no free rides, baby.
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.
