I realized that everything important in sci-fi showed up in the magazines first. It's the proving ground for new writers and new ideas.
— Orson Scott Card
In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him.
One mind can think only of its own questions; it rarely surprises itself.
The best thing about my job, though, is stopping at the end of the day and rejoining the human universe.
Writing sessions can last an hour or sixteen hours, depending on how it's going.
The education that prepared me was my general education classes, which I tried to avoid when I was a stupid undergraduate, but which gave me the foundation of general knowledge that makes a career as a writer possible.
I hope I am remembered by my children as a good father.
In all my study of history, I have never found a time or place I would rather have lived than now.
There is more good writing and good acting in any ten minutes of Twister than in, say, all of Citizen Kane.
I don't believe that there are aliens. I believe there are really different people.
The lies we live will always be confessed in the stories that we tell.
It's the middle class that feels the luxury of being able to have causes.
As long as you keep getting born, it's alright to die some times.
There's a reason why every human society has fiction. It teaches us how to be 'good', to behave in a way that is for the benefit of the whole community.
I wonder sometimes if the motivation for writers ought to be contempt, not admiration.
You who speak languages, you are such liars.
Of course, I also hear from critics who detest what I do, and while sometimes I feel rather proud of having made various the loathsome people or groups angry, at other times I wonder why I put up with such grief.
But in the meantime I became accustomed to the writing life and it would be hard to change now - partly because of the salary cut if I went to my other love, teaching; and partly because I still have stories to tell, even though it isn't all that fun doing the work anymore.
I fell into playwriting accidentally, took some classes in it, and also took creative writing classes, but I really didn't expect it to be a career because I didn't believe there was a way to make money as a playwright without being lucky and I didn't feel particularly lucky.
I buy way too many books.
I have lived in the only decades I could have lived in, and hope to live through at least a few more.
Ulysses, obviously. It was an elaborate prank, and our supposed intellectual elite continue to fall for it.
God, our genes, our environment, or some stupid programmer keying in code at an ancient terminal - there's no way free will can ever exist if we as individuals are the result of some external cause.
Laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books.
Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.
Everything important in sci-fi showed up in the magazines first. It's the proving ground for new writers and new ideas.
Your work is first, learning is first, winning is everything because without it there is nothing.
Among my most prized possessions are words that I have never spoken.
Working is hard and distracts from having fun.
The most important training, though, is to experience life as a writer, questioning everything, inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that, all the other things will come; if you don't, there's no hope for you.
My college training was primarily in theatre, with an eye to becoming a director, actor, or producer.
I am especially grateful, however, to have known the fifties, before we began to poison our own civilization - or at least before the effects of the poison began to be felt.
I listen to music constantly while writing.
My favourite all-time work of fiction: Lord of the Rings. My favourite all-time nonfiction book: Guns, Germs, and Steel. Ask me again next week, you'll get a different answer.
The priests say that God created our souls, and that just puts us under the control of another puppeteer. If God created our will, then he's responsible for every choice we make.
I say this as a Democrat, for whom the Republican domination of government threatens many values that I hold to be important to America's role as a light among nations. But there are no values that matter to me that will not be gravely endangered if we lose this war.
Unemployment is capitalism's way of getting you to plant a garden.
