Novelists From The United States

"Lesbianism is the ultimate expression of a feminist philosophy."

"Hate comes from the past, fear from the future. Pain and pleasure are now, and therefore their own trap."

"“Chicken?” “Don’t want my feathers ruffled, it that’s what you mean.”"

"Definitions are just words, just labels. And once you label something, the label gets between you and the thing."

"It was on one of those terrible, fever-clouded days when the serpent beneath southern California awoke. It stretched from slumber, shedding its skin, the screams of its wrath heard in the shriek of tortured steel, of splintering wood and concrete. Maxine was torn from her slumber by the moans of the dying and the awful sound of her ramshackle apartment shifting on its foundations. “Earthquake!” She pulled herself from the bed, stumbled from her building into the street, and watched the lurching structures and snapping powerlines, the buckling sidewalks and exploding water mains, as a seismic debt long outstanding came due."

"And your life is ruined because you tried to do the Right Thing. Join the club honey—guess what, there are a few more of us out here who’ve had our brains beaten our with our own dreams."

"The price of chemical ecstasy was a dear one, paid in flesh and spirit."

"“Don’t be afraid of dying. A Warrior lives with death, Aubry. Welcome it as an ally. All other fears are just fragments of death, forms of unbecoming. A fighter clings to life, and therefore cannot win. A warrior treats life and death as the same thing, and therefore cannot lose.”"

"This allowed me to do what writers treasure more than anything else: catch the reader off-guard. There’s nothing better than knowing you’re going to outwit with the reader. And the type of people who read sci-fi are very difficult to outwit."

"As a chemist, Vogel knew how to make a bomb. In fact, much of his training was to avoid making them by mistake."

"What's your name?" The computer asks. I look down at my sheet toga. "I am the great philosopher Pendulus!" "Incorrect."

"Then I sat for a moment, dumbstruck that my plan had actually worked."

"I’m damned tired of being needed. Being needed is just the flip side of being royally screwed."

"I started the day with some nothin’ tea. Nothin’ tea is easy to make. First, get some hot water, then add nothin’."

"Marketing is finding women who like sex or would like to find out if they do. Sales is convincing them that they want to go home with YOU, right NOW."

"The world doesn’t give a damn what we feel or want. Only what we are, and what we do."

"You started my training by buying me a beer. For breakfast. Germans are awesome."

"Amazingly, some of the bacteria survived. The population is strong and growing. That’s pretty impressive, when you consider it was exposed to near-vacuum and subarctic temperatures for over twenty-four hours. My guess is pockets of ice formed around some of the bacteria, leaving a bubble of survivable pressure inside, and the cold wasn’t quite enough to kill them. With hundreds of millions of bacteria, it only takes one survivor to stave off extinction. Life is amazingly tenacious. They don’t want to die any more than I do."

"“It just goes to show,” Teddy said. “Love of science is universal across all cultures.”"

"“It’s bigger than death, Aubry.” “You’re wrong,” he said, his voice utterly chill. “Nothing is bigger than death.”"

"“You know, it isn’t that you can’t get information in electronic form, or microfilm, or disk, or cube, or any of the other forms—tape, holographic computer feed.” He paused. “Tell me, Aubry—what’s the similarity between all the modes of information storage I’ve just named?” Aubry scratched his head. “They don’t take up as much space as books, I guess.” “Yes, that’s true enough—but as far as I’m concerned, the difference is that they all require an external power source.” He cocked his head sideways, until he looked absurdly like a bird examining a piece of fruit. “Do you understand that that makes you dependent upon others?” Promise ran her hands over the spines of a nearby stack, then shook her head. “Not cubes. There are plenty of solar-powered cube-readers. One sunny day a week, and you’re set.” “True enough, but you are still dependent upon others to repair your viewer if it breaks down...the more advanced a technology, the more fragilely inter-dependent it is.” “So what?” Warrick shrugged. “It just seems to me that the most valuable thing that any human has is the ability to educate himself, to find out about the world around him, to program his primary organ of perception—his brain. And that basic, inalienable right should be as independent of external factors as possible. Once a book is printed and acquired, it’s yours. Nothing else is needed except a pair of eyes and daylight. Individual books have lasted for hundreds of year—do you really think you can say the same of your little viewers, or computers, or whatever? If you have a hundred libraries stored on cube, and your viewer breaks down, you have nothing. Give me an encyclopedia, and if it isn’t totally destroyed by fire, I can dig it out, dry it off, piece it together, and still have something of value.” His gaze became direct, and piercing. “There is nothing more important than directing the flow of information into your mind. It determines all—your attitudes, your actions, your life. You can rely upon the visual and audible media all you want—but they should be in addition to reading, not in place of it. If other forms replace reading, then your input is restricted, and much more dependent upon other people, who may or may not have your best interests at heart.” “So, that’s the most important thing you can think of in life? Reading?” Warrick sighed. “You are being obstinate, my friend. You learn if you learn.”"

"As you can see, this plan provides many opportunities for me to die in a fiery explosion."

"“But seeing his status doesn’t help,” Mindy said. “It’s not like we can do anything about it if he falls behind. This is a pointless task.” “How long have you worked for the government?” Venkat sighed."

"Wanden olstrum end kendesorum. Isen ne bejstrum."

"Kaz, this whole "shoot me" thing is starting to concern me."

"No mourners. No funerals."

"Manners were something that people who don’t have, but admire, resent not having."

"…in talking it over with Negroes, I find that the tale is so old and so well known that it is almost folklore. It has many variations: sometimes it is the woman’s brother, husband, son, lover, preacher, beloved master, or even her father, mother, sister, or daughter who is killed. A Negro sociologist tells me that there are literally hundred of these stories. Anyone could have written it up at any time."

"a ‘modern’ woman who smokes, wears her dresses short, does not believe in religions, churches and the like, and feels that people of the artistic type have a definite chance to help solve the race problem."

"Fanfiction lets you share the kind of story you like with other people who take delight in it, too, and lets you participate in making that sort of story for those people…"

"I enjoy all the different levels of engagement. Whether it’s going to be a slow burn or an instant, raging forest fire depends on the story…"

"There were never any characters that looked like me or my sisters or my girlfriends…Our stories needed to be told."

"Urban planning is a long history of cities (and their planners) seeing, and deliberately not seeing, the people who live in them. Working in city planning makes me consider the city as an organism, as a machine for living in…"

"I hope the first set we meet are kind and smart and savvy, and also mammals who breathe oxygen and have hierarchical structure, because otherwise we’re going to not be able to figure out how to say anything useful and understandable, and if they’re not kind, they may decide they’re better off without us…"

"I’m still learning, I’m still finding stuff that fascinates me. I’m still putting people out front who I call the “unsung” — those who once had places in history and made a difference, but who have now been forgotten. Because, you know, you bring them back to life [when you write about them], and they live again."

"I feel as if empire is something that is either taken for granted in space opera—uninterrogated, simply present as a fact of worldbuilding—or it is rendered so evil as to be incomprehensibly bad…"

"A lot of times, as I like to say, I was the only chip in the cookie…I chose to embrace who I am and what I do, and keep my head down and keep writing, and hoped that things would change. But it was lonely in the sense that I was the only."

"I think the “young adult” age is such a critical period of our lives. Young adults are still young enough to dream of magic and possibility, yet old enough to think for themselves and to begin to make real change in the world."

"Change is effected by instruments of the state directly—and quickly—on the sociophysical body of the city itself. As the inhabitants of this body, these modifications rub off on us, whether we are aware of their effect on us or not, whether our class cushions us less or more…"

"Having grown up watching Hong Kong movies with gorgeous Chinese leads and casts, I didn’t feel starved of representation the way I might likely have felt if I had grown up Asian American in the US, or as a minority race in Singapore…"

"My responsibility, as an author, is to the novel I am writing, nothing more and nothing less. How that novel comes about to me is a mysterious thing that then becomes a rigorous process, and the balances that I do worry about keeping are narrative, aesthetic, or technical. I’m not willing or able to see myself as any one nationality or ethnicity or gender or sexuality or species when I write, I am just an amorphous storyteller whose personal biography is moot…"

"When writing, I often feel like I’m having an out-of-body experience in which I’m as ageless, sexless, classless, raceless as I can ever humanly get…I have to forget myself so I can be fully committed to understanding my character’s motivations in a way that isn’t facile or boxed in…"

"Guys in prison are always saying, “I wish someone would write my life story. It would be a bestseller.” So I thought I’d start writing my life story…"

"I think that part of the problem is that a lot of black writers are … satisfied with being successful outside of what you’d call literary fiction. And if you take that satisfaction, you don’t get in the club. You have to write literary fiction to get in the club. And there aren’t that many black writers that they’ve allowed in the club to choose from…"

"Journalism is just very structured…One day I turned in a story and [an editor] said to me, ‘You can’t compare inanimate objects with animate objects,’ and I realized I had to leave."

"I had no idea how lonely it would be to sit in my cave and type, for years and years. I have developed a totally new personality where I talk to myself and play with my hair for entertainment. The surprise is that after much frustration and exhaustion, I do manage to finish a novel."

"The sometimes-negative aspect of growing up in this country without a firm cultural basis is that your entire being becomes predicated on satisfying others. And I discovered that's what I was doing…"

"We're at an era where a lot of people are beginning to step in, in a really firm way, into their identities. Whether people are saying...they're born with one sex, they say: I'm actually another gender—that's who I am; or people are claiming their cultural heritage in a more profound way than they have in the past...For any number of reasons, we have an opportunity to construct our identities that are more honest and open and true to who we are than what we've been handed at birth."

"They're told to gather the stories of their parents and grandparents and to honor their cultural history. And yet, as they're born in the United States, they don't identify with Vietnam and feel strongly that these are not their roots, so how can they lose them?"

"Growing up, I experienced this viscerally because my parents are from Nigeria, I was born and raised in America and my parents tried to hand over that identity card and that didn’t fit me because I was growing up in a context in which their identity didn’t necessarily line up with how I saw myself…"