The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.

He is far too intelligent to become really cerebral.

What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?

There are no right answers to wrong questions.

To light a candle is to cast a shadow.

Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.

If you see a whole thing - it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives... But up close a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern.

I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.

When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.

We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.

If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.

My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it.

There's a good deal in common between the mind's eye and the TV screen, and though the TV set has all too often been the boobtube, it could be, it can be, the box of dreams.

Morning comes whether you set the alarm or not.

Love does not just sit there, like a stone; it had to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.

It is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception and compassion and hope.

Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.

To oppose something is to maintain it.

The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.

If you want your writing to be taken seriously, don't marry and have kids, and above all, don't die. But if you have to die, commit suicide. They approve of that.

It is good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters in the end.

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.

It had never occurred to me before that music and thinking are so much alike. In fact you could say music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music.

The creative adult is the child who has survived.

The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.

Great artists make the roads; good teachers and good companions can point them out. But there ain't no free rides, baby.

I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived.

I talk about the gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.

I've got some gift for languages. You follow your gift. But Latin's not easy.

My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world, and exiles me from it.

The artist deals in what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.

Belief is the wound that knowledge heals.

The great authors share their souls with us " literally.

You cannot blame everything on the enemy.

Primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite it is war.

A forest ecology is a delicate one. If the forest perishes its fauna may go with it. The Athshean word for world is also the word for forest.

When you light a candle you also cast a shadow

What the brain does by itself is infinitely more fascinating and complex than any response it can make to chemical stimulation.

A forest ecology is a delicate one. If the forest perishes its fauna may go with it. The athshean word for world is also the word for forest.

Grieving like being blind is a strange business you have to learn how to do it. We seek company in mourning but after the early bursts of tears after the praises have been spoken and the good days remembered and the lament cried and the grave closed there is no company in grief. It is a burden borne alone.

Only in silence the word only in dark the light only in dying life bright the hawks flight on the empty sky.

You always have to defend the imagination against idiots.

When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow.

A machine is more blameless, more sinless even than any animal. It has no intentions whatsoever but our own.

The machine conceals the machinations.

Truth is a matter of the imagination.

The misogyny that shapes every aspect of our civilization is the institutionalized form of male fear and hatred of what they have denied and therefore cannot know, cannot share: that wild country, the being of women.

Love doesn't just sit there like a stone; it has to be made,like bread, remade all the time, made new.

If civilization has an opposite, it is war. Of these two things, you have either one, or the other. Not both.