There's a unique bond of trust between readers and authors that I don't believe exists in any other art form; as a reader, I trust a novelist to give me his or her best effort, however flawed.

The truth is, it's not a great career move to create a readership and then, in effect, abandon them.

There's a unique bond of trust between readers and authors that I don't believe exists in any other art form; as a reader, I trust a novelist to give me his or her best effort, however flawed.

As for the depiction of the Catholic church, it's not meant to be a prediction.

But it's not just a game of finding literary references.

But I think, and hope, that the novels can be understood and enjoyed as science fiction, on their own terms.

I loved almost everything about being a teacher, but I was an unusual teacher.

Writing, I'm convinced, should be a subversive activity - frowned on by the authorities - and not one cooed over and praised beyond common sense by some teacher.

It started 25 years ago, when I was teaching elementary school in a small town in Missouri.

No one inspired me to write, but writer Harlan Ellison terrified me into getting published.

It's odd how violence and humor so often go together, isn't it?

It's one of the strangest attributes of this profession that when we writers get exhausted writing one thing, we relax by writing another.

Movie SF is, by definition, dumbed down - there have only been three or four SF movies in the history of film that aspire to the complexity of literary SF.

I knew that I wanted to be a writer even before I knew exactly what being a writer entailed.

As long as my sixth graders showed an average improvement of five years, the principal and district pretty much left me alone to create my own curriculum and teach whatever I wanted.

He loved the darkness and mystery of the Catholic service the tall priest strutting like a carrion crow and pronouncing magic in a dead language the immediate magic of the Eucharist bringing the dead back to life so that the faithful could devour Him and become Him the smell of incense and mystical chanting.

Power a currency that never went out of style.

Real life seldom structures a decent denouement.

The Great Change is when humankind accepts its role as part of the natural order of the universe instead of its role as a cancer.

In twentieth century Old Earth a fast food chain took dead cow meat fried it in grease added carcinogens wrapped it in petroleum based foam and sold nine hundred billion units. Human beings. Go figure.

A hero. You want to be one of those rare human beings who make history rather than merely watch it flow around them like water around a rock.

Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become.

The whole planet reeks of mysticism without revelation.

Prison always has been a good place for writers, killing, as it does, the twin demons of mobility and diversion.

Seduction was both a science and art, a blend of skill, discipline, proximity, and opportunity. Mostly proximity.

Those who ignore history's lessons in the ultimate folly of war are forced to do more than relive them, they may be forced to die by them.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

The principal rule of art is to please and to move. All the other rules were created to achieve this first one.

I grew up with art from the innocent age of ten - with art, but with no sense of identity.

One does not devote one's life in art to shock an audience.

The other great development has been in photography, but that too was influenced by Conceptual art.

My art became very public.

Riding a race bike is an art - a thing that you do because you feel something inside.

The idea is, if I can't heal from my art, then how can you heal?

But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in poetry.

One does not need buildings, money, power, or status to practice the Art of Peace. Heaven is right where you are standing, and that is the place to train.

I don't believe in art. I believe in artists.

Art cannot be modern. Art is primordially eternal.

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.

We have often been attracted to the story of the other, the outcast. And he and I just loved working together, so it just kept happening, and our relationship is completely bound up with our work. We enjoy each other's art.

Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.

It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.

At the University of Maryland, my first year I started off planning to major in art because I was interested in theatre design, stage design or television design.

Art is an expression of who you are. Parts that I play are my sculptures.

There has always been quite a strong black and white art tradition in Australia, with quite a large contingent of cartoonists, given the size of the population.

There is probably nothing wrong with art for art's sake if we take the phrase seriously, and not take it to mean the kind of poetry written in England forty years ago.

A man who exposes himself when he is intoxicated, has not the art of getting drunk.

What motivates me in art is the ugly and beautiful nature of the truth. It has to be truthful and honest, even if it is ugly and grotesque.

A great thing happening now in art is that artists are using the figure, the body, clothing, life.