Fantasy Authors

"She took the story in like some strange, spiked gift, too fragile to drop, too painful to hold."

"The old customs are dead, and we keep trying on new ones, like badly fitting clothes."

"Even after four days of oatmeal and blue cheese dressing, they were a disappointment. “Are you sure this isn’t instant boots?” asked Cordelia."

"I suppose my determination to be a soldier stems from that date. I mean the real thing, not the parades and the uniforms and the glamour, but the logistics, the offensive advantage, the speed and surprise—the power. A better-prepared, stronger, tougher, faster, meaner son-of-a-bitch than any who came through that door."

"Save me from that! To pour your life into sons for eighteen or twenty years, and then have the government take them away and waste them cleaning up after some failure of politics—no thanks."

"If it ever came down to exerting power by force, it would mean I’d already lost it."

"Leadership is mostly a power over imagination, and never more so than in combat. The bravest man alone can only be an armed lunatic. The real strength lies in the ability to get others to do your work."

"“Smoke test?...What’s that?”... “It’s an ancient and honorable term for the final step in any engineering project,” Leo explained. “Turn it on, see if it smokes.”"

"He gave himself up to God and pressed the button."

"And what is the most important leg of a three-legged stool? The one that is missing, of course."

"If you ever have to make a choice between learning and inspiration, boy, choose learning. It works more of the time."

"Shooting people was such a stupid activity, why should everybody—anybody!—be so impressed? Silver wondered irritably. You would think she had done something truly great, like discover a new treatment for black stem-rot."

"“I could bring almost nothing—I scarcely knew what to choose.” “Think of the vast amounts of money we shall save on shipping charges, then.”"

"Clearly, you could die while waiting for other people to start your life for you."

"He loathed letting her push his buttons; still, she had a valid point: cover-your-ass was a fundamental rule for survival even of the fittest."

"We make our own luck. And it’s my responsibility to see it’s good and not bad."

"“We’ve run into a problem, Leo.” “But of course. Who ever tracks me down to impart good news?"

"“The trouble with you, Ti,” lectured Leo kindly, “is that you lack teaching experience. If you had, you’d have faith that the most unlikely people can learn the most amazing things.”"

"The quaddies, he reflected, didn’t seem to have a very clear idea of private property. Probably came from a lifetime spent in a communal space habitat, with its tight ecology. Planets were communal in the same way, really, except that their enormous size put so much slack in their systems, it was disguised."

"God’s not here. Somebody’s got to fill in."

"This isn’t a class. This is real life."

"Even soldiers in battle have to be brought to a special state of mental excitement to shoot total strangers."

"There are weapons all around us here, we just don’t recognize them because we call them “tools.”"

"GalacTech’s not God, Claire. You shouldn’t have to sacrifice your firstborn to it."

"Claire, listen to me. The proper response to Bruce isn’t suicide, it’s murder."

"I don’t know whose judgement is worse, yours or the jerk’s who hired you—"

"The line of logic trailed off in confusion; he turned his thoughts impatiently from it. Mental wheel-spinning, as unproductive as philosophy class in college."

"Of all the times to pick for this outbreak of idiocy, this has gotta be the worst possible. It’s got to be deliberate. Nothing this fouled up could be by chance."

"Were you born inhuman, or did you grow so by degrees—M.S., M.D., Ph.D..."

"Whether you function as welders or inspectors, the laws of physics are implacable lie-detectors. You may fool men. You will never fool the metal. That’s all."

"On the sixth day God saw He couldn’t do it all, it read, so He created engineers."

"Writing is a very redemptive profession, because all of your mistakes can be reclassified as raw material. ... All those things that went awry become material and become more manageable, psychologically and otherwise. ... My five years I spent wandering around in college and left without a degree (to my parents' dismay) — all turned out to be useful to my career ..."

"There’s an awful a lot of gaming of the list that goes on in book promotion, where you try to make everybody aware of your book at the same time, try to get them to buy it, get it noticed, get it visible. Which is kind of the opposite of the way I’ve written. I’ve not written bestsellers, I’ve written evergreens. Every book I’ve ever written is still in print."

"I am a shy person when allowed. I regard a lot of the PR — s, speeches, appearances, media interviews — with much the same dismay as a non-swimming parent would contemplate the prospect of jumping into a raging torrent to rescue their child. One doesn't really see how any good can come of it, but one can't not jump. ("My baby book, help, it is drowning!") I need to get in touch with my surly side more, I suppose, to learn to say "no" to nice people who like me."

"I cannot emphasize enough that I do not start with a plan or agenda and mechanically manipulate characters and events to carry it out. I set characters in motion, and let them teach me what the book is."

"Women do desperately need models for power other than the maternal."

"I've described my usual writing process as scrambling from peak to peak on inspiration through foggy valleys of despised logic. Inspiration is better — when you can get it."

"All great human deeds both consume and transform their doers. Consider an athlete, or a scientist, or an artist, or an independent business creator. In the service of their goals they lay down time and energy and many other choices and pleasures; in return, they become most truly themselves. A false destiny may be spotted by the fact that it consumes without transforming, without giving back the enlarged self. Becoming a parent is one of these basic human transformational deeds. By this act, we change our fundamental relationship with the universe — if nothing else, we lose our place as the pinnacle and end-point of evolution, and become a mere link. The demands of motherhood especially consume the old self, and replace it with something new, often better and wiser, sometimes wearier or disillusioned, or tense and terrified, certainly more self-knowing, but never the same again."

"It's a bizarre but wonderful feeling, to arrive dead center of a target you didn't even know you were aiming for."

"They say you should never meet your heroes, and I tell you whoever said that had lousy heroes. Well, the few of you reading this fortunate enough to know Harlan know that if you scheduled a call with him, you called immediately at the specified time. Not one minute before, not one minute after. You called right. On. Time. One day I did not. Harlan read me the riot act and demanded to know what was so fucking important that I made him wait twenty minutes for me. I revealed to him that I’d discovered that day that the woman who was my geek Yoda in high school, the girl who had introduced me to numerous films, books, and video games and had been the one who put Harlan's own books into my hands for the very first time, had died at all too young an age. In that moment Harlan became one of the most gentle souls I've ever spoken with. “Oh, kid,” he said somberly, “do I ever know how that feels.” Then he consoled me for an hour, asking about her, talking at length what it was like losing Asimov and Bradbury and too many countless others. Then he revealed to me his greatest fear: that though he outlived his friends, he would be swallowed up by them, forgotten to the mists of time as little more than a footnote to so many other careers."

"I was in classes sometimes where I was the only Black person and tend to either get ignored or get petted on the head a lot. Neither is in the slightest useful so I was eager to get away from that and Harlan was not interested in doing either."

"I remember getting into Harlan Ellison's class and at one point having him say, science fiction fans read too much science fiction; and he was no doubt right, but as an adolescent that was all I read except for school work."

"I had one very good teacher who is also a writer, Harlan Ellison. He gave me a lot of help and a hard push or two when I needed them. It so happens that he writes a lot of fantasy and science fiction and was able to give me the kind of help I wouldn't have received from some English teacher."

"Harlan Ellison was a major influence, particularly his short story collection Dangerous Visions."

"Harlan is a giant among men in courage, pugnacity, loquacity, wit, charm, intelligence — indeed in everything but height."

"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; but if you really make them think, they'll hate you."

"I go to bed angry every night, I wake up angry every morning. There are certain injustices in this life you’ve got to do something about. You can’t just say that you can’t fight it, or it’s too much trouble, or that you don’t have the time or the effort, or that you can’t win. Forget all that. Fight them all! I fight them all because you never know which one is the big one. You never know which you give up and then it will come back and bite you in the ass. You never look away from a mountain lion, you lock eyes and you don’t let him get behind you."

"I’ve been on my own since I was 13. I grew up having to use my wits. My parents were not wealthy. We weren’t poor, but we had a lot of meals with noodles. I was born during the Depression. My parents died pretty much penniless. Every dollar I’ve ever made I earned myself. I don’t believe in luck. Louis Pasteur said, "Chance favors the prepared mind." The smarter you are, the more you know, the better. I was the only Jew in town and I was my generation’s Bart Simpson. I knew the world could be mine."

"It is my hope that all of you who walk down the street with an iPod plugged into your head are hit by a Seven Santini Brothers moving van. I look down on a lot of you … not because you’re not terrific people, but because you’re not stupid, you’re ignorant. Big difference. Ignorance is never having seen a film by Akira Kurosawa. It’s not knowing who Guy de Maupassant is. …By the way if I miss, during the evening, saying something offensive to you, insulting your sexual proclivity, your physical disability, your race, your religion, your sex, anything, please, raise your hand. I’ll get to you, I promise. I’ll say something really nasty."

"When they dug the body out of the alley, it made even the hardened construction workers and emergency squad cops ill. Not one bone was left unbroken. The very flesh seemed to have been masticated as if by a nation of cannibal dogs. Even so, the three inured excavators who finally used winding sheets and shovels to bring the shapeless mess up from its five-foot grave agreed that it was incredible, totally past belief, that the head and face were untouched. And they all agreed that the expression on the face was not one of happiness. There were many possible explanations for that expression, but no one would have said terror, for it was not terror. They would not have said helplessness, for it was not that, either. They might have settled on a pathetic sense of loss, had their sensibilities run that deep, but none of them would have felt that the expression said, with great finality: a man may truly live in his dreams, his noblest dreams, but only, only if he is worthy of those dreams."