 But in the meantime I became accustomed to the writing life and it would be hard to change now - partly because of the salary cut if I went to my other love, teaching; and partly because I still have stories to tell, even though it isn't all that fun doing the work anymore. |
| Your work is first, learning is first, winning is everything because without it there is nothing. |
| I say this as a Democrat, for whom the Republican domination of government threatens many values that I hold to be important to America's role as a light among nations. But there are no values that matter to me that will not be gravely endangered if we lose this war. |
| Ulysses, obviously. It was an elaborate prank, and our supposed intellectual elite continue to fall for it. |
| I hope I am remembered by my children as a good father. |
| I realized that everything important in sci-fi showed up in the magazines first. It's the proving ground for new writers and new ideas. |
| In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. |
| Among my most prized possessions are words that I have never spoken. |
| The lies we live will always be confessed in the stories that we tell. |
| Writing sessions can last an hour or sixteen hours, depending on how it's going. |
| Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space. |
| Laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books. |
| The most important training, though, is to experience life as a writer, questioning everything, inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that, all the other things will come; if you don't, there's no hope for you. |
| I buy way too many books. |
| You who speak languages, you are such liars. |
| Of course, I also hear from critics who detest what I do, and while sometimes I feel rather proud of having made various the loathsome people or groups angry, at other times I wonder why I put up with such grief. |
| In all my study of history, I have never found a time or place I would rather have lived than now. |
| Everything important in sci-fi showed up in the magazines first. It's the proving ground for new writers and new ideas. |
| There's a reason why every human society has fiction. It teaches us how to be 'good,' to behave in a way that is for the benefit of the whole community. |
| Unemployment is capitalism's way of getting you to plant a garden. |
