Critics From The United States

"“And, as a result of this examination,” the forked pink beard smiled down gently from above, “the specialists discovered that what you call the human race was nonviable. That is, while the individuals composing it had strongly developed instincts of self-preservation, the species as a whole was suicidal.” “Suicidal!” I found myself breathing up with rest. “Quite. This is a matter on which there can be little argument from the more honest among you. High civilization is a product of communal living and Man, in groups, has always tended to wipe himself out. In fact, a large factor in the development of what little civilization you do experience has been the rewards contingent upon the development of mass-destruction weapons.”"

"People quoted Henry Dorselblad’s indictment of modern society: “Women needed the law’s special protection when they were legally inferiors of men. Now they have equality and special protection. They can’t have both!”"

"Laws produce lawbreakers, Bernie, like hens produce eggs. Civilization has nothing to do with it."

"That’s the big gimmick in this business—dressing it up so they can’t tell it’s the same thing they’ve been seeing since they got their first universal vaccination. If you dress it up enough, the sticks will always go nuts over it. Maybe the critics will make cracks, sure, but who reads the critics?"

"“Take it easy, Fatty, and we'll be all right,” I told him with all the assurance of a bank robber trying to explain to the policeman who caught him that he was only trying to deposit his gun in the vault and the cashiers misunderstood him."

"“Size, power, numbers—since the beginning of time, those three have been trying to correlate with right and wrong. So far, they haven’t succeeded.” Nodding, the Ambassador murmured, “Very true. But, on the other hand, they do exceedingly well with life and death.”"

"The sad truth about political saints of any given past is that nobody but a scholar will take the trouble to read their complete works and try to see them whole."

"It had taken a couple of billion years to produce me. In that couple of billion years, I had millions upon millions of ancestors. Slime-like ancestors, jelly-like ancestors, water-breathing ancestors, air-breathing ancestors, ancestors that floated, that swam, that crawled, that ran, that climbed, that finally walked. And all of those ancestors, no matter how different, had one thing in common. They had survived long enough to have descendants. Other species didn’t and their lines were extinct, bare bones in rock strata. But no matter how scarce food got, no matter what enemies they faced, what unprecedented natural upheavals they had to adjust to, my ancestors somehow managed to pull through, and have offspring. That’s how I happen to be here."

"The delegate returned to tell his countrymen that the Americans, always notorious for their madness, had finally specialized in cretinism."

"A man doesn’t volunteer for a hitch in hell just so he can knock off one of the devils."

"The real world. As good a name for it as any other. Carter was a mystic never and a Freudian only when the occasion suited him. His credo was simple: anything that is, is real."

"Don’t be bitter, young sir. If you want to go on living you have to be alert. And you can’t be alert and bitter at the same time."

"“Creatures trained in warfare are what he calls ‘philosophically anti-life.’”"

"His clothes, he knew, were in almost ostentatious good taste—they screamed restraint and expensive lowness of key."

"Thank you very much for your lesson, but now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to go on, please. Some of us aren’t civil service workers: our time is valuable."

"“I’ve always been a loner. With whatever help I can buy, I take care of myself. I’m not interested in any goal except the extra buck. First and last, I’m a businessman.” “Oh, stop it!” the dark man took a turn up and down the office angrily. “This is a planet-wide emergency. There are times when you can’t be a businessman.” “I deny that. I can’t conceive of such a time.” Braganza snorted. “You can’t be a businessman if you’re strapped to a huge pile of blazing faggots. You can’t be a businessman if people’s minds are so thoroughly controlled that they’ll stop eating at their leader’s command. You can’t be a businessman, my slavering, acquisitive friend, if demand is so well in hand that it ceases to exist.” “That’s impossible.” Hebster had leaped to his feet. To his amazement, he heard his voice climbing up the scale to hysteria. “There’s always demand. Always! The trick is to find what new form it’s taken and then fill it!” “Sorry. I didn’t mean to make fun of your religion.”"

"Science, my forward-looking friend, is a complex of interlocking theories, all derived from observation."

"He reached into his soul for an article of fundamental faith, found it. “I can make money,” he quoted to himself. “That’s what I’m good for. That’s what I can always do.”"

"“It's a rough war, isn't it?” I smiled back. “Rough? Why, if you're not careful, they tell me, you can get killed in it.”"

"But now he had to have another look. It might not be so bad the second time. “It’s always darkest,” he told himself with determined triteness, “before the dawn.” And then found himself involuntarily adding, “Except on days when there’s an eclipse.”"

"Haven’t you ever heard it said that money isn’t everything, but that what it isn’t it can buy?"

"Whether or not the science fiction will eventually develop a Shakespeare, I would not dare to predict. But I do claim that it is a literature produced by our times as much as Shakespeare's was by his. And its unfortunate, frequent vulgarities can well be equated with the vulgarities and plebeian absurdities of much Elizabethan writing, both reflecting the primitive vitality of the mass audience that responded to them. It is, of course, in any age, only moribund fiction that is polished to a point of antisepsis, and that will, in losing touch with its audience, “lose the name of action.” This new medium has as yet lost neither."

"The human mind is lit by an elemental sense of wonder, a probing, restless curiosity that is our primate heritage and that from its beginnings has sought a knowledge, some knowledge, of the future. To satisfy that need there has come into being a massive and thoroughly modern creation, science fiction, the literature of extrapolative, industrial man."

"“They said you treated them very well, that you showed them as much respect as a thing like you could generate. They also said you cheated them.” “Oh, well, Theseus,” Hebster spread his manicured hands. “I’m a businessman.”"

"Irving Bommer looked like a man who had gone down into the Valley of the Shadow and had seen much more there to fear than such picayune things as Evil."

"“Wh-who are you? And what do you want?” “Joseph Burns, a poor but honest newspaperman.” He considered for a moment. “Well, poor, anyway.”"

"They are a highly individualistic people and still experience many frictions living in a centralized society. Despite several centuries of advanced civilization, most Gtetans look upon the Law as a delightful problem in circumvention rather than as a way of life."

"He knew what the score was—and from here on out, he would be acting on what he knew rather than on what others told him."

"Science fiction, thus considered, is not a mere pocket in the varicolored vest of modern writing; it is a new kind of fiction, the beginnings of a long-delayed revolution in letters consequent upon the revolutions that the last two hundred years have witnessed in science, industry, and politics. By this I do not at all mean that it is the only possible literature of the present time, just that it is the type most peculiar to it, most indicative of its larger intellectual trends."

"And there, right there, is the area in which science fiction leads the literary side of its life. It is the job of the science-fiction writer to take the utterly fantastic, if need be, and make it seem as real as a copy of today's tabloid newspaper folded to the sports section. To the extent that he succeeds in this he is a good science-fiction writer, and to the extent that he fails to make the story believable he is a bad one, be it ever so full of faster-than-light gimmicks and futuristic individuals with triple brains and mechanical genitalia."

"Modesty was not a condition from which Descartes suffered."

"“Death,” the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once wrote, “is not an event in life.” He meant, maybe (for it’s hard to be sure—Wittgenstein was rather titanically cryptic), that being dead is not something we actually experience and that since we aren’t conscious of a nonliving state it is literally meaningless, so instead of spending our lives worrying about the future we should look at each instant as an eternity. We should live in the moment. Perhaps this is true, and wise, but in an ordinary sense Wittgenstein was completely wrong. Death is the event in life. It is our chief organizing principle. It’s why we rush and why we dawdle, why we better up our bosses and fawn over our children, why we like both fast cars and fading flowers, why we write poetry, why sex thrills us. It’s why we wonder why we are here."

"The irony is that in shifting the focus onto the individual human mind, which everyone agrees can be a pretty flimsy and wayward organ, Descartes had arrived at the closest thing to a certain basis for knowledge. If my own thoughts are the only indubitable ground I can stand on, apparently they aren’t so flimsy after all, at least not all the time. As an earlier follower of Descartes put it, “doubt is the beginning of an undoubtable philosophy.” Therefore the mind and its “good sense”—that is to say, human reason—are the only basis for judging whether a thing is true. With the “cogito,” as philosophers abbreviate it, and with the theory of knowledge that arises from it, which Descartes outlined in the Discourse on the Method and later works, human reason supplanted received wisdom. Once Descartes had established the base, he and others could rebuild the edifice of knowledge. But it would be different from what it had been. Everything would be different."

"The situation in biology was particularly complex. Biologists craved the sort of base principles that Newton had developed for physics. Trying to classify life-forms begged the question of what overall purpose you had in mind. The system that was still largely in effect in the early nineteenth century was the “teleological taxonomy” created by Aristotle and refined by the Scholastic philosophers: the “scale of beings” system, which the French called the série, or series, and which is popularly known as the “great chain of being.” As with the medieval system of bodily humors, it was far more complex and useful than its popular stereotype suggests, but it had a serious limitation, which was its teleological basis."

"If the West is heading toward some kind of crisis, it’s worth asking ourselves a few basic questions. Modern society as we normally define it—a secular culture built around tolerance, reason, and democratic values—occupies a rather small portion of the world, and there are signs that it is shrinking. Is modernity the inexorable force of progress that we tend to assume? Is it a mere moment of human history that is fast fading? If it is something to value, how can we rediscover it, separate the good and the bad in it, make it relevant and vital?"

"1984 is Orwell saying goodbye to himself, and an improbably convincing portrait of the erasure of the autonomous individual."

"In short, "neoliberalism" is not simply a name for pro-market policies, or for the compromises with made by failing social democratic parties. It is a name for a premise that, quietly, has come to regulate all we practise and believe: that competition is the only legitimate organising principle for human activity."

"The sky is colored like a peacock's breast; There lingers yet one thin, chill line of gold Down where the woods their somber branches hold In silhouette against the fading west. Dark leaves, dark earth, slow-breathing and at rest, Whence frail scents rise of dew-wet grass and mold. A single star gleams diamond-clear and cold, Like one sharp note from elfin viol wrest. This is the haunted hour,—such woods surround Grey Merlin in his oak, adrouse with dwale; In such a gloaming once the lorn knight found ⁠The faery woman in the river-vale; And underneath this star long, long ago The Dark Tower heard a lonely slug-horn blow!"

"That is the corrosive paradox of gender feminism's misandrist stance: no group of women can wage war on men without at the same time denigrating the women who respect those men."

"As our schools become more feelings centered, risk averse, competition-free, and sedentary, they move further and further from the characteristic sensibilities of boys."

"I think it means where the artist doesn’t necessarily have a full understanding of something, but they have deep empathy. They have some kind of amazing empathy with the characters in the world. I just think it means being openhearted and generous. I think that to be a conscious person is to sort through stuff in order to understand not just yourself but how you feel in the world."

"I think I was just a very skinless person…And I had this terrible need to confess; and I still do it…It’s a bid to be loved, in some way."

"In order to write anything profile-driven, I would become the person; and then I would analyse the person from within. Earlier, I would analyse them from without. But if I was going to write about him now, I would do it internally, so then it would be fiction.”"

"The damage suffered by people I know and love is almost always based on the trauma of the only elder they had treating them badly or being interested only in their silence. And what you’re left with, by the grace of God and some miracle, is this inner self. Our experiences are painful and sometimes annihilating, and if we have the strength to crawl out of and excavate that wreckage, we have to ask ourselves how to describe the truth of it."

"I usually start from a concept, an idea, a form, a question, or a (sub)genre. Never a character or a setting. And I don’t write into nothing; I always have somewhere I’m directing my thoughts."

"There’s something so dark and weird about what a cliché it is…And it makes art harder because it’s like how do I turn this thing that operates on cliché — its life blood is the cliché — and create something interesting from this incredibly dead thing? If you say it’s as hot as an oven, your brain skips over the phrase, it’s so worn. And that’s what makes cliché so dangerous. If you say it enough, you lose your ability to engage with it in any kind of critical capacity."

"People like domestic violence narratives to be very clear cut, and I talk about in the book how on some level I really wished, I wish she had just punched me in the face, and I had this black eye, and I could be like, "Hey, she punched me. I had a black eye. You recognize that, right?" But it was a lot more subtle than that…"

"Sometimes stories just need something to hold on to, and form is a way of doing that. Sometimes you’re looking at a story and you’re like, What comes next? But if I say I have to add an item to the list, another lover or an episode of SVU…it’s easier."

"... I find writing nonfiction difficult; it feels like pulling teeth. It’s technically and logistically challenging and emotionally draining, and the whole time you have one hand behind your back. I admire folks who write good nonfiction so much, because I’ve seen firsthand how hard it is to make it work and work well."

"Lesbian relationships are the fantasy, the ideal — I would say that I think lesbians and queer women perpetrate that that idea. And I think it can be really harmful, because it doesn't permit space for a multitude of experiences, some of which can be bad — not because the relationship is a lesbian relationship, but because somebody in the relationship is not well."