Children S Authors

"“There’s three ways not to see what you don’t want to,” she told me. “One is the coward’s way and too painful. The other is to close your eyes forever, which is the same as the first, when it comes to it. The third is the hardest and the best: you have to make sure only the things you can afford to see come before you.”"

"You make what you see into a window, and you see what you want through it. You make what you see a sort of a door."

"In a newsagent’s he picked up a copy of the Standard, and hesitated by the chocolate, looking at the low-fat version he had trained himself to pretend he liked but suddenly hungry for a real bar, which with guilty devil-may-care he took and paid for."

"I see echoes with lots of books in all my books, some deliberate, some unconscious until later, and as long as that is respectful I think that's great - writing on the shoulders of other writers is a privilege."

"Although we revolutionary socialists are always accused of being Utopian, nothing strikes me as more Utopian than the reformist belief that with a bit of tinkering and some good faith, we can systematically improve the world. You have to ask how many decades of broken promises and failed schemes it will take to disprove that hope. Marxism isn’t about saying you’ll get a perfect world: it’s about saying we can get a better world than this one, and it’s hard to imagine, no matter how many mistakes we make, that it could be much worse than the mass starvation, war, oppression, and exploitation we have now. In a world where 30,000 to 40,000 children die of malnutrition daily while grain ships are designed to dump food into the sea if the price dips too low, it’s worth the risk."

"Socialism and SF are the two most fundamental influences in my life."

"It’s the first principle, isn’t it? Whoever’s arguing fiercest for violence is the cop."

"I refuse to play the wink-wink-nudge-nudge game with readers. I don’t like whimsy because it doesn’t treat the fantastic seriously, and treating the fantastic seriously is one of the best ways of celebrating dialectical human consciousness there is. The one-sided celebration of the ego-driven contextually constrained instrumentally rational (as opposed to rational in a broader sense) is bureaucratic: the one-sided celebration of the subconscious, desire/fantasy driven is at best utopian, at worst sociopathic. The best fantasies—which include sf and horror—are constructed with a careful dialectic between conscious and subconscious."

"New Weird—along with the other mo(ve)ments of which it’s some kind of cousin, the Ratbastards, the Interstitial Arts, the New Space Opera and others—reflected a major cultural shake-up. Soon, though, if not already, those groups will have their epigones, and will probably be the very fantasy mainstream they were railing against. At which point, doubtless, some new punkass radicals will come along and subvert us all, by writing about hobbits."

"But it's a prize that... if you're into science-fiction and fantasy you grow up reading books with "Hugo [Award-winner]" on the cover. And this is very, very moving, to be in that position oneself. It's an odd situation [too], because, as you say, it was a tie, which is very rare with the Hugo, which has happened, like three times over sixty years, or something. But I prefer to think of it as a quantum Hugo and that Paolo Bacigalupi and I oscillate between between Hugo particle and wave form, this year. So it's properly science-fictional."

"The other, more nebulous, but very strong influence of RPGs was the weird fetish for systematization, the way everything is reduced to “game stats.” If you take something like Cthulhu in Lovecraft, for example, it is completely incomprehensible and beyond all human categorization. But in the game Call of Cthulhu, you see Cthulhu’s “strength,” “dexterity,” and so on, carefully expressed numerically. There’s something superheroically banalifying about that approach to the fantastic. On one level it misses the point entirely, but I must admit it appeals to me in its application of some weirdly misplaced rigor onto the fantastic: it’s a kind of exaggeratedly precise approach to secondary world creation."

"That’s the trouble with trying to counter clichés—the counterclichés cliché quicker than shit off a shovel, and with that comes domestication. Either you lose any subversive gloss at all—the hip-hop which now sells us jeans and cheese once fought the power—or, what’s perhaps worse, a horrible zombie gloss of radicalism is retained while you shuffle into the corridors of establishment, rotting."

"This was not the time for rage but for politics and strategy."

"The reason that I like SF and fantasy and horror is that to me it's the pulp wing of surrealism."

"The thing about good pulp is that you trust the reader and you know that the mind is a machine to process metaphors so of course all those connections will be there. But you've also granted the fantastic its own dynamic and allowed that awe. There's no contradiction. So I want to have monsters as a metaphor but I also want monsters because monsters are cool. There's no contradiction."

"There’s simultaneously something rigorous and something playful in genre. It’s about the positing of something impossible—whether not-yet-possible or never-possible—and then taking that impossibility and granting it its own terms and systematicity. It’s carnivalesque in its impossibility and overturning of reality, but it’s rationalist in that it pretends it is real. And it’s that second element which I think those who dip their toes in the SF pond so often forget. They think sf is “about” analogies, and metaphors, and so on. I refute that—I think that those are inevitable components, but it’s the surrendering to the impossible, the weird, that characterizes genre. Those flirting with SF don’t surrender to it; they distance themselves from it, and have a neon sub-text saying, “It’s okay, this isn’t really about spaceships or aliens, it’s about real life,” not understanding that it can be both, and would do the latter better if it was serious about the former."

"I am often asked is [my work] science fiction or fantasy and my answer is usually ‘Yes’."

"You didn’t know, but not knowing is no excuse."

"Mercantile law ruled: let the buyer beware."

"As far as I'm concerned, some of the best literature of the last hundred years has come out of the genre tradition and of course the best of it challenges expectations just as the best of literary fiction challenges those expectations. But it's not that genre fiction is any more a constraint than mimetic fiction. So I see myself very much as a genre writer. I love the fantastic genres. I see what I'm doing as a development of them but very much a part of them. I never feel that I'm leaving them behind. I try and be as experimental and avant-garde and stretching as I can be but I don't see that as turning my back on the genre at all. Genre has always been able to encompass that."

"They had always tried not to think too hard about the rules of their relationship, but the longer they were together the more this strategy of avoidance became impossible. Questions as yet unasked demanded attention. Innocent remarks and askance looks from others, a moment of contact too long in public-a note from a grocer-everything was a reminder that they were, in some contexts, living a secret. Everything was made fraught. They had never said, We are lovers, so they had never had to say, We will not disclose our relationship to all, we will hide from some. But it had been clear for months and months that this was the case."

"A person can find anything if he takes the time, that is, if he can afford to look. And while he’s looking, he’s free, and he finds things he never expected."

"I only want to live in peace, plant potatoes and dream!"

"Those damn Moomins. I don't want to hear about them any more. I could vomit on the Moomintrolls."

"Maybe my passion is nothing special, but at least it's mine."

"I'll have to calm down a bit. Or else I'll burst with happiness."

"So Ishar was a butcher, a mad surgeon as well as a crazed theocrat. For some reason, that relieved Dalinar. It was disgusting, but this was an ordinary kind of evil. He’d expected something worse."

"All this time, he’s been asking what a god could possibly fear, but the answer was obvious. Odium feared men who would not obey him."

"“The way you talk lacks hope.” “‘Hope,’” she said, spreading her papers out on the table. “Have I ever told you how much I dislike that word? Think of what it means, what it implies. You have hope when you’re outnumbered. You have hope when you lack options. Hope is always irrational, Uncle.”"

"Who did she think was listening? Was she only praying because she was afraid? Yes, she thought, continuing to paint. I’m afraid. And I have to hope that someone, somewhere, is listening. That someone has a plan. That it all matters somehow. Jasnah took comfort in the idea that there was no plan, that everything was random. She said that a chaotic universe meant the only actions of actual importance were the ones they decided were important. That gave people autonomy."

"“You run like a coward.” “Every good sergeant is a coward! And proud of it! Someone needs to talk sense to the officers!”"

"He grinned, then kissed her hand again. He seemed to think that sort of thing would eventually spark passion in her. When in truth, physical stimulation was so inferior to mental stimulation."

"War was a masculine art, but when you started attacking women, you’d stopped engaging in war. You deserved anything that happened to you after that point."

"True freedom—with the power to make certain she didn’t ever have to be dependent upon anyone else, listener or spren. True freedom couldn’t exist while someone else had power over you."

"“Innocence is more false a god than the ones in our songs,” Venli said, sitting beside her sister. “People who chase it will find themselves enslaved.”"

"Those gods had never deserved reverence. What was a god who only made demands? Nothing but a tyrant with a different name."

"“You like irony now too?” “Irony tastes good. Like sausage.”"

"The trouble wasn’t getting answers. It was finding the presence of mind to accept them."

"“Nothing is real,” Wit said. “At least by one measure of philosophy. So enjoy what you seem to be able to eat and don’t complain.”"

"In her little room of a laboratory, everything fit together. She’d met scholars who claimed they needed chaos to function. Perhaps that was true for some, but in her experience, good science wasn’t about sloppy inspiration. It was about meticulous incrementalization."

"“Your stories always have a point,” Kaladin said. “I am an artist,” Wit said. “I should thank you not to demean me by insisting my art must be trying to accomplish something. In fact, you shouldn’t enjoy art. You should simply admit that it exists, then move on. Anything else is patronizing.”"

"The man who forges weapons can claim he’s never killed, but he still prepares for the slaughter."

"She knew she shouldn’t let the lack of results bother her. Real scientists understood that experiments like this weren’t failures; they were necessary steps on the way to discovery."

"You don’t get to choose to be free, Venli. Just which master to follow."

"It’s too easy to forget the cost not only to the boys who die, but to the ones who live. Every commander should be reminded periodically."

"I name you idiot for playing with powers you only presume to understand."

"“We proved nothing,” Navani said. “We had a single failed experiment.”"

"Any information—even if you suspect your enemy is feeding it to you—is useful, son. More wars are lost to lack of information than are lost to lack of courage."

"We must not let our desires for a specific result cloud our perceptions."

"A thousand wrong plans were no more useful that a single wrong one."