It is inevitable that those to whom is vouchsafed a long life of usefulness should outlive the friends of their youth.
My boyhood life in New York City has impressed me with the popular ignorance and also with the great need of something better than local lore and weather proverbs.
Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination.
Our ‘neoconservatives’ are neither new nor conservative, but old as Bablyon and evil as Hell.
One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity, there ain’t nothin’ can beat teamwork.
Our culture runs on coffee and gasoline, the first often tasting like the second.
Power is always dangerous. Power attracts the worst and corrupts the best.
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Say what you like about my bloody murderous government,’ I says, ‘but don’t insult me poor bleedin’ country.
For myself I hold no preferences among flowers, so long as they are wild, free, spontaneous. Bricks to all greenhouses! Black thumb and cutworm to the potted plant!
May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.
Grown men do not need leaders.
Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.
If the end does not justify the means – what can?
A drink a day keeps the shrink away.
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A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.
Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others.
The tragedy of modern war is that the young men die fighting each other – instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals.
Love implies anger. The man who is angered by nothing cares about nothing.
You can’t study the darkness by flooding it with light.
Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit.
When a man’s best friend is his dog, that dog has a problem.
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Abolition of a woman’s right to abortion, when and if she wants it, amounts to compulsory maternity: a form of rape by the State.
There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California.
The missionaries go forth to Christianize the savages – as if the savages weren’t dangerous enough already.
The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders.
That which today calls itself science gives us more and more information, and indigestible glut of information, and less and less understanding.
Taxation: how the sheep are shorn.
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Society is like a stew. If you don’t stir it up every once in a while then a layer of scum floats to the top.
Climbing K2 or floating the Grand Canyon in an inner tube; there are some things one would rather have done than do.
Civilization is a youth with a molotov cocktail in his hand. Culture is the Soviet tank or L.A. cop that guns him down.
What is the purpose of the giant sequoia tree? The purpose of the giant sequoia tree is to provide shade for the tiny titmouse.
There is nothing that compares to an unexpected round of applause.
It’s been a long time since I’ve written old-fashioned sword and sorcery; I’m hoping it’s like riding a bicycle.
It’s possible to become so comfortable with one’s style and structure that one ceases to grow.
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My writing has to support more than my research habit, but I love to curl up with a book about some dusty corner of history.
Neophyte writers tend to believe that there is something magical about ideas and that if they can just get a hold of a good one, then their futures are ensured.
No one uses a ribbon typewriter any more, but your final draft is not the time to try to wring a few more sheets out of your inkjet cartridge.
Once you’ve invested hundreds of hours in creating a coherent universe, your story’s grown to around a half-million words and can’t be written as anything less than a trilogy.
One of my great passions is the collection of historical trivia.
Short-story writing requires an exquisite sense of balance. Novelists, frankly, can get away with more. A novel can have a dull spot or two, because the reader has made a different commitment.
The money can be decent, but I really don’t recommend the work-for-hire route as an entry into publishing. Too many things can go wrong.
I’m dense when it comes to discouragement.
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When I have an idea, it goes from vague, cloudy notion to 100,000 words in a heartbeat.
When I’m not writing or tweaking my computer, I do embroidery. When I’m not plunging into the past, tweaking, or embroidering, I’m reading books about history, computers, or embroidery.
That bedrock faith that I could write was what blinded me to attempts to discourage me.
I do have a small collection of traditional SF ideas which I’ve never been able to sell. I’m known as a fantasy writer and neither my agent nor my editors want to risk my brand by jumping genre.
A good short-story writer has an instinct for sketching in just enough background to ground the specific story.
Editors of open anthologies actively seek submissions from all comers, established and unknown. They are willing to read whatever the tide washes up at their feet.
I’m one of those writers who, when writing, believes she’s god-and that she hasn’t bestowed free will on any of her characters. In that sense there are no surprises in any of my books.
For me, writing a short story is much, much harder than writing a novel.
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It took me about 12 years to reach my million-word mark. The challenge now is to continue to challenge myself.
I think my prose reads as if English were my second language. By the time I get to the end of a paragraph, I’m dodging bullets and gasping for breath.
I write sets of books, but I’ve also written a lot of orphans.
I’m a writer first and an editor second… or maybe third or even fourth. Successful editing requires a very specific set of skills, and I don’t claim to have all of them at my command.
I’m always trolling for trivia.
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During the many centuries that magic, here on this planet, was presumed to have worked, there were at least as many theories as to how magic worked as there were cultures and religions.
I’m not constrained by being a genre writer. Any story I can imagine, I can cast as a fantasy novel and probably get it published.
I’ve read short stories that are as dense as a 19th century novel and novels that really are short stories filled with a lot of helium.
Ideas aren’t magical; the only tricky part is holding on to one long enough to get it written down.
If you write, one of the questions you’re always trying to answer is, Where do you get your ideas? And, if you write, you know how pointless a question this is and how difficult it is to answer.
Photography helps people to see.
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Does not the very word ‘creative’ mean to build, to initiate, to give out, to act – rather than to be acted upon, to be subjective? Living photography is positive in its approach, it sings a song of life – not death.
I didn’t decide to be a photographer; I just happened to fall into it.
Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past.
The camera is no more an instrument of preservation, the image is.