Hugo Award Winners

"I am a priest. It’s my job to whip individuals or groups into a frenzy."

"You know his dictum: nothing is anything unless it is something. That is, a concept without material reality is meaningless."

"“That’s not an appealing thought.” Afsan had never worried about how appealing any given idea was, only about how accurate it might be."

"“I’ve never heard you talk like this before.” “We all change with the passing of the days.”"

"Afsan stood tall. “I am not afraid.” “Fear is important, young one. Fear is the counselor. Those who don’t know when to fear wind up dead.”"

"It embodies, perhaps more clearly than anything else I've written, the central theme of all my work: namely, that clearheaded, unflinching, rational thinking is the only effective way to deal with reality."

"Not a word of my writing has ever been changed by another person's hands, and I don't think many screenwriters can say that."

"It's TV shows like BUFFY and ANGEL that usually have an incredible cliffhanger every commercial break that amaze me."

"I just make crap up more than anything else."

"If a good editor will let me tell my story with the right artist, I'm happy."

"I'm the one who started spreading that particular factoid, about Bendis, Azz and me all being bald Brian's from Cleveland, just to get my name mentioned in the same sentence as two much-better writers, and it's worked like a goddamn charm. Next up, I'm going to grow a big, disgusting beard, just so people will start talking about Alan Moore and me in the same breath."

"I've always thought of fantasy as a genre of best-case scenarios, and horror as a genre of worst-case scenarios."

"I really like Colossus, actually, especially because only Ultimate writers get to use him. Eat it, Whedon!"

"It's about how boys become men — and why it takes women to make that transformation possible."

"When I was in college, I was belittling the woman who later become my wife for not knowing who Boba Fett was, and she responded by asking me if I knew who the Prime Minister of Israel was. Surprisingly? Not Mon Mothma."

""Writer's block" is just another word for video games. If you want to be a writer, get writing, you lazy bastards."

"I, for example, am a pompous asshole, but my comics are genius!"

"The man is a complete wackadoo, but so is every great actor who ever lived. You gotta separate the artist from his/her art, or you won't be able to enjoy anything."

"But Cruise is really good!"

"Your own creations are your own children; you gave life to them, so you’ll always have, if not more passion to them, more connections to them."

"I think it was born out of that grade school fantasy that a lot of nerds like me had, which was "I could probably get the cute red-headed girl that sits across from me, if only every other boy in the entire school dies.""

"Comics are essentially films with fewer frames per second."

"I will not listen to childcare lectures from a man who put his daughter in a box and shipped her to Maine."

"I watch a lot of TV, but I find that recently it’s largely oddball stuff … Scripted stuff sometimes feels like homework, like I'm scoping out the competition or something."

"Movies are always made by committees, and the writer is not at the head of the committee. Thus, mush."

"I love the way Law and Order doesn’t always put their heroes on the side of good. And sometimes they win, sometimes they lose and sometimes for the wrong reasons. I also think it’s interesting that there is a series that has remained story-driven in its, what, sixtieth season, right ? If not for them, I would argue that all shows eventually become soap operas about the lives of the characters. Law And Order does what it does and does it well. It may simply be that you’re mistaking consistency for blandness, how ’bout that, fella?"

"Moonlighting was funny, innovative, genre-busting chaos. Also, apparently, unsustainable. Sigh."

"I recently had to wait two and a half hours in a doctor's office, just waiting to be seen. I literally was genuinely thinking "Well, maybe this is a time loop", because nothing seemed to be happening, no progress of any kind seemed to be being made, so I think we've all fallen into those time loops."

"I hope I am pigeonholed with comedy. I’m really not interested in writing the darker stuff, the emotional stuff."

"I can't make real-life workplaces safer and more fair for women just by showing them with briefcases or crossbows. But I can try to grant my characters the quirky gift of humanity — whether they're adjudicating torts or dishing tortes or saving the world. And hope the little girls watching do the rest."

"Today the percentage of female judges, college professors and detectives seen on television is a pretty good reflection of the actual world. (In the case of judges, I wouldn't be shocked to find out the number on television exceeds the number in real life — what is it about those black robes that makes us think ovaries?) But merely thrusting more women into more prestigious on-screen jobs doesn't necessarily make the working world a better place for women. If you were to show people images of two real-life professionals, one a man, one a woman, and ask them to rate their competence knowing nothing but job and gender — I bet people still give the guys the edge. It's not television's fault, exactly. But television can help fix the problem. Not by writing women into better professions, but by more accurately showing them as complex people contending with the sort of snide, generous, ambitious, incompetent, sad and hilarious co-workers who populate real workplaces."

"Children are the world's most ardent traditionalists. They like things stable and categorized. They want to know what girls can do and what girls can't do. Television, like it or not, teaches them a lot of these rules."

"I've been a television writer for a dozen years, and I've been fortunate to put words in the mouths of some great female characters. They've been working women, mostly, and I like to think they've become role models for a generation of girls trying to figure out their futures. But let's be honest: TV isn't going to change anyone's perceptions of working women in the real world just by promoting fictional females to ever-higher positions of authority. And I'm not doing my job if I put a woman's career before her character."

"Any story worth telling relates to real life in some meaningful way. Scifi allows you to tell meaningful stories without seeming too preachy — it adds a metaphorical layer between the story and the real world. Scifi is dismissed as ungrounded fluff, but it's actually the opposite."

"CAROL: You don’t care for the music? JACQUE: Music! It’s just a gimmick to sell lutes and flutes."

"Men started to geoform the earth in the middle of the twentieth century. Unfortunately, a lot of the early work was done by people who failed to see the earth as a closed set of mutually interrelated systems."

"Most aliens in science fiction aren’t truly alien, and that’s not because science fiction writers lack imagination, but because the purpose of an alien in a story is usually to provide a meaningful distortion of human nature."

"I never found anyone else and I don’t want anyone else. I don’t care whether you’re ninety years old or thirty. If I can’t be your lover, I’ll be your nurse."

"It was making me a little queasy. Doctors don’t seem to realize that most of us are perfectly content not having to visualize ourselves as animated bags of skin filled with obscene glop."

"I had to stifle an impulse to laugh. Surely “cowardice“ had nothing to do with his decision. Surely he had nothing so primitive and unmilitary as a will to live."

"Relativity propped it up, at least gave it the illusion of being there...the way all reality becomes illusory and observer-oriented when you study general relativity. Or Buddhism. Or get drafted."

"She hadn’t been such a bad girl before the power went to her head."

"I have always valued quiet, and the eternity of it that I face is no more dreadful than the eternity of quiet that preceded my birth."

"Big money seeks out the company of its own, for purposes of reproduction."

"“I’m a sort of literature specialist. American literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Usually. Most of my timespace is taken up with guys like Hemingway, Teddy Roosevelt, Heinlein, Bierce. Crane, Spillane, Twain. “William Dean Howells?” “Not him or James or Carver or Coover or Cheever or any of those guys. If everybody gave me as little trouble as William Dean Howells I could spend most of my timespace on a planet where the fishing was good.” “Masculine writers?” John said. “But not all hairy-chested macho types.” “I’ll give you an A- on that one. They’re writers who have an accumulating effect on the masculine side of the American national character. There’s no one word for it, though it is a specific thing: individualistic, competence-worshiping, short-term optimism and long-term existentialism. ‘There may be nothing after I die but I sure as hell will do the job right while I’m here, even though I’m surrounded by idiots.’ Do you see the pattern?”"

"Nothing is simple. The only thing that’s simple is that nothing is simple."

"“You do this by yourself? You’re God?” “There’s not just one of me. In fact, it would be meaningless to assign a number to us, but I guess you could say that all together, we are God…and the Devil, and the Cosmic Puppet master, and the Grand Unification Theory, the Great Pumpkin and everything else. When we consider ourselves as a group, let me see, I guess a human translation of our name would be the Spacio-Temporal Adjustment Board.”"

"A good writer remembered everything and then forgot it when he sat down to write, and reinvented it so the writing would be more real than the memory. Experience was important, but imagination was more important."

"Key West is lousy with writers, mostly poor writers, in one sense of that word or the other."

"A person who thinks he learns science from science fiction is like one who thinks he learns history from historical novels, and he deserves what he gets."