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"And in down times it shakes a lot of the bad SF out, a lot the stuff that was bought for literary reasons, which is neither entertaining nor great literature."
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"Some books sold because they are (said to be) great. Some are (said to be) great because they sold."
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Personal Development
"The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy. The nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product. He was invented by Turgenev, and completed by Dostoevsky. Robespierre came out of the pages of Rousseau as surely as the People's Palace rose out debris of a novel. Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose."
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Personal Development
"Literature always anticipates life. It doesn't copy it but moulds it to it's purpose."
Author Name
Personal Development
"This would be...a book that would be a trapdoor down into some place dark. A place only you could go, alone, when you opened the cover. Because only books have that power."
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Personal Development
"A good novel tells us the truth about its hero, but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author."
Author Name
Personal Development
"No, said Bran. "I haven't. And if I have it doesn't matter. Sometimes Old Nan would tell the same story she'd told before, but we never minded, if it was a good story. Old stories are like old friends, she used to say. You have to visit them from time to time."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Like someone excitedly relating a story, only to find the words petering out, the path gets narrower the further I go, the undergrowth taking over."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."
Author Name
Personal Development
"For what was it about books that once finished left the reader in a bit of a haze and made them reread the last few sentences in order to continue the ringing in their hearts a while longer, so as not to let the silence illumine the fact that reading, they had gained something - distance, a lesson, a companion, a new world - but now, after the last full stop, they had lost something palpable and felt a little emptier than before."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Do you understand now why books are hated and feared? Because they reveal the pores on the face of life. The comfortable people want only the faces of the full moon, wax, faces without pores, hairless, expressionless."
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Personal Development
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"Because Tom Doherty and people like that are not stupid. If they could have streamlined their operation more to get more money out of it, they would have done it. It's not like they're a bunch of idiots."
Money
"There were probably, what, 300 science-fiction members in the SFWA, of whom probably a hundred were active members in the sense that they were selling something every year, or every couple years."
Science
"And that's another piece of advice I'll give junior writers; when you get to the point where they take you to lunch, let the editor suggest where to go."
Advice
"Asimov was the reason why we changed some rules in the SFWA, and I'm not convinced we changed it for the best."
Reason
"Write a lot. And finish what you write. Don't join writer's clubs and go sit around having coffee reading pieces of your manuscript to people. Write it. Finish it. I set those rules up years ago, and nothing's changed."
People
"The hard part of writing at all is sitting your ass down in a chair and writing it. There's always something better to do, like I've got an interview, sharpening the pencils, trimming the roses. There's always something better to do. Going to a writer's club?"
Writing
"And in down times it shakes a lot of the bad SF out, a lot the stuff that was bought for literary reasons, which is neither entertaining nor great literature."
Literature
"I think it takes about a million words to make a writer. I mean that you're going to throw away."
Writing
"And meanwhile, the storytellers like me and Anderson, Silverberg... we tell stories. People like them. They want to know how it comes out, they want to know what the ending is."
People
"To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection."
Doubt
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