Novelists From The United States

"“Silence, Set!” cries Anubis. “Don’t listen to him, Madrak. He sees your weakness, as he sees the weaknesses of all things he encounters. He seeks to draw you onto a battlefield of another sort, one where you struggle against yourself, to be beaten by the guilt he has contrived for you. Ignore him!”"

"Oh, cynical monger of indulgences! ’Twould take a man of the cloth to work a scheme like that!"

"This day she’ll off across the sky on her own wild ways to show.… There, in the worlds of the Life and the Death, the worlds that she used to know. Now, some say her name is Mercy and others say it’s Lust. Her secret name is Isis. Her secret soul is dust."

"Insofar as I may be heard by anything, which may or may not care what I say, I ask, if it matters, that you be forgiven for anything you may have done or failed to do which requires forgiveness. Conversely, if not forgiveness but something else may be required to insure any possible benefit for which you may be eligible after the destruction of your body, I ask that this, whatever it may be, be granted or withheld, as the case may be, in such a manner as to insure your receiving said benefit. I ask this in my capacity as your elected intermediary between yourself and that which may not be yourself, but which may have an interest in the matter of your receiving as much as it is possible for you to receive of this thing, and which may in some way be influenced by this ceremony. Amen."

"“It is difficult to understand. It seems brutal, it seems harsh…” “It is life and it is death. It is the greatest blessing and the greatest curse in the universe. You do not have to understand it, Wakim. Your comprehension or your lack of it, your approval or your disapproval, will in no way alter its operation.”"

"“Some worlds have too much life,“ he says. “Life—crawling, pullulating, fecundating, smothering itself—worlds too clement, too full of the sciences which keep men alive—worlds which would drown themselves in their own semen, worlds which would pack all of their lands with crowds of big-bellied women—and so go down to death beneath the weight of their own fruitfulness. Then there are worlds which are bleak and barren and bitter, worlds which grind life like grain. Even with body modifications and with world-change machines, there are only a few hundred worlds which may be inhabited by the six intelligent races. Life is badly needed in the worst of these. It can be a deadly blessing on the best. When I say that life is needed or not needed in certain places, I am of course also saying that death is needed or not needed. I am not speaking of two different things, but of the same thing. Osiris and I are bookkeepers. We credit and we debit. We raise waves, or we cause waves to sink back again into the ocean. Can life be counted upon to limit itself? No. It is the mindless striving of two to become infinity. Can death be counted on to limit itself? Never. It is the equally mindless effort of zero to encompass infinity.”"

"My mind spun for a second before it drifted, and in that second I knew that of all pleasures—a drink of cold water when you are thirsty, liquor when you are not, sex, a cigarette after many days without one—there is none of them can compare with sleep. Sleep is best...."

"The Hellenic world did not view the passage of time as we do. History was considered in an episodic sense, as the struggles of an unchanging mankind against a relentless and unchanging fate. The slow process of organic evolution had not yet been detected, and the grandest model for a world view was the seeming changeless patterning of the stars. It took the same processes that set the stage for science fiction—eighteenth-century rationalism and nineteenth-century science—to provide for the first time in the history of the world a sense of historical direction, of time as a developmental, nonrepetitive sequence. This particular world view became a part of science fiction in a far more explicit fashion than in any other body of storytelling, as it provided the basis for its favorite exercise: extrapolation. I feel that because of this, science fiction is the form of literature least affected by Aristotle’s dicta with respect to the nature of the human condition, which he saw as immutable, and the nature of man’s fate, which he saw as inevitable."

"“Nothing we did in those days has caused a change.” “Because of what we did, things remained as they were, rather than getting worse,” I told him."

"Be warned, therefore, that one does not go to hell to light a cigarette."

"The absence of a monument can, in its own way, be something of a monument also."

"I wasn’t disappointed, inasmuch as I expected nothing."

"I've always been impulsive. My thinking is usually pretty good, but I always seem to do it after I do my talking—by which time I've generally destroyed all basis for further conversation."

"“What did you say to her?” “I gave her a clinic referral card that said, ‘Diagnosis: Bitch. Prescription: Drug therapy and a tight gag.’”"

"“Do you think they’re really people?” “Naw, they’re too good.”"

"“Beware,” she recited a personal beatitude, “those who hunger and thirst after justice, for we will be satisfied.” “And beware the meek,” she continued, “for we shall attempt to inherit the Earth.”"

"“I intend to do that after dinner,” he stated, “because I believe in the ritualistic value of rescue-motions. They shall be made.”"

"“He who sleeps well enters the day somewhere in the middle of the second act.” “Myself, I usually come in around intermission and ask someone for a synopsis,” she explained."

"Her thirtieth birthday, like a huge black cloud, filled an April but four months distant."

"Any human experience should be describable and interpretable—by a good enough writer."

"An intense study of mental illness is often quite revealing as to the nature of the stresses in the society where the illness was made. If anxiety patterns fall into special groups and classes, then something of the discontent of society can be learned from them."

"But while pleasure and pain are rooted in biology, they are conditioned by society: thus are values to be derived."

"Between the black of yesterday and the white of tomorrow is the great gray of today, filled with nostalgia and fear of the future."

"“The power to hurt,” he said, snapping on a lapel microphone and activating his recorder, “has evolved in a direct relationship to technological advancement.”"

"“Statistics aren’t the same thing as destiny, Bennie. Everybody makes his own.” “Statistics or destiny?” “Both, I guess.” “I think that if something’s going to happen, it’s going to happen.” “I don’t. I happen to think that the human will, backed by a sane mind can exercise some measure of control over events. If I didn’t think so, I wouldn’t be in the racket I’m in.”"

"The fact remains that you would be dealing, and dealing constantly, with the abnormal. The power of a neurosis is unimaginable to ninety-nine point et cetera percent of the population, because we can never adequately judge the intensity of our own — let alone those of others, when we only see them from the outside. That is why no neuroparticipant will ever undertake to treat a full­blown psychotic. The few pioneers in that area are all themselves in therapy today. It would be like driving into a maelstrom. If the therapist loses the upper hand in an intense session he becomes the Shaped rather than the Shaper. The synapses respond like a fission reaction when ner­vous impulses are artificially augmented. The transference effect is almost instantaneous."

"The universe did not invent justice. Man did. Unfortunately, man must reside in the universe."

"You don’t know what it’s like to be cut off from a whole area of stimuli! To know that a Mongoloid idiot can experience something you can never know—and that he cannot appreciate it because, like you, he was condemned before birth in a court of biological happenstance, in a place where there is no justice—only fortuity, pure and simple."

"“I sank Atlantis,” he said, “personally. “It was about three years ago. And God! it was lovely! It was all ivory towers and golden minarets and silver balconies. There were bridges of opal, and crimson pennants and a milk-white river flowing between lemon-colored banks. There were jade steeples, and trees as old as the world tickling the bellies of clouds, and ships in the great sea-harbor of Xanadu, as delicately constructed as musical instruments, all swaying with the tides. The twelve princes of the realm held court in the dozen-pillared Coliseum of the Zodiac, to listen to a Greek tenor sax play at sunset.”"

"My feelings are that science fiction, with its rational, quasi-documentable approach to existence, springs from the well-lighted, well-regulated areas of our private universes, whereas fantasy, in the tradition of its historical origins, has its roots in the dark areas. Somewhere, I already hear voices raised in objection to my implication that fantasy springs from ignorance and science fiction from enlightenment. In a way it is true, and in a way it is not."

"According to John Pfeiffer, author of The Human Brain, “There is an entire universe packed inside your skull, a compact model of your surroundings based on all the experiences you have accumulated during the course of a lifetime. Of necessity such a model is limited by the range of one’s perceptions and the nature of one’s experiences. Thus, the world about which I write, the world to which I hold up my distorting mirror, is not the real world in any ultimate sense. It is only my limited, personal image of the real world."

"I wonder what Hokusai would have done in contemporary times? He is silent on the matter."

"“And what is imagination?” “A thing born of feeling and reason.”"

"Mirror, mirror, why does the real world so seldom cooperate with our aesthetic enthusiasms?"

"There is a part of me which likes to see things through allusions and touched with mystery. And the American part never trusts anything and is always looking for the real story behind the front one."

"But I remember that Ernest Hemingway told Bernard Berenson that the secret of his greatest book was that there was no symbolism. The sea was the sea, the old man an old man, the boy a boy, the marlin a marlin, and the sharks the same as other sharks. People empower these things themselves, groping beneath the surface, always looking for more."

"We revisit the mental landscape of childhood in times of trouble."

"But I believe it was the Rilke who said that life is a game we must begin playing before we have learned the rules. Do we ever? Are there really rules? Perhaps I read too many poets."

"Faith is beyond me. I will settle for hope."

"I know, too, that death is the only god who comes when you call."

"I have no intention of climbing Fuji and accounting for myself, to God or to anything else. Only the insecure and the uncertain require justification. I do what I must. If the deities have any questions they can come down from Fuji and ask me. Otherwise, this is the closest commerce between us. That which transcends should only be admired from afar."

"But love can mean many things. It can be an instrument of aggression or a function of disease."

"If I had just done something decent and noble, why did I feel so stupid about it? Probably because it was out of character."

"I was, at one level, still plagiarizing my earlier self. Nothing wrong with that, if some growth has occurred in the meantime."

"The important thing for me is the development and refinement of one’s perception of the world, the experimentation with viewpoints. This lies at the heart of storytelling, and all of the mechanical techniques one learns are merely tools. It is the writer’s approach to material that makes a story unique."

"Of the three basic elements of any fiction—plot, character, and setting—it is the setting that requires extra attention in science fiction and fantasy."

"Do you know what happens to artists who fall in love with their models? They come to a bad end. The same applies to scientists."

"There is some thing vulnerable about Dorothy, times when she lapses into such a strong dependence that he feels oddly moved. Other times, it just irritates the hell out of him. Perhaps this is the closest he can come to love now, an occasional ambivalent response to being needed."

"Anyway—as I was saying—there are for me stories of character, stories of idea and stories of image. These refer to the portals by which they enter my universe. The completed product, in the best of all possible worlds, should contain all three elements. But two is okay. And I’ll even settle for one on a bad day when I need the money."

"True epics of course are few and historically well spaced, but that slightly more mundane ingredient, the speculative impulse, be it of Classic, Christian or Renaissance shading, which ornamented Western literature with romances, fables, exotic voyages and utopias, seemed to me basically the same turn of fancy exercised today in science fiction, working then with the only objects available to it. It took the Enlightenment, it took science, it took the industrial revolution to provide new sources of idea that, pushed, poked, inverted and rotated through higher spaces, resulted in science fiction. When the biggest, the most interesting ideas began emerging from science, rather than from theology or the exploration of new lands, hindsight makes it seem logical that something like science fiction had to be delivered."