Writing

"Panicky despair is an underrated element of writing."

"Every day I ran to that book like it was a bottle of whiskey and crawled inside because it was a world that I had at least some control over, and slowly, in time, it began to take shape."

"There is a rule for fantasy writers: The more truth you mix in with a lie, the stronger it gets."

"What difference does it make if you live in a picturesque little outhouse surrounded by 300 feeble minded goats and your faithful dog? The question is: Can you write?"

"I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language."

"People who read your ideas tend to think that your writings reflect your life."

"A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam."

"No book can ever be finished. While working on it we learn just enough to find it immature the moment we turn away from it"

"The best fame is a writer's fame. It's enough to get a table at a good restaurant, but not enough to get you interrupted when you eat."

"In the end, fiction is the craft of telling truth through lies."

"The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book."

"Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia."

"You may not be able to change the world, but at least you can embarrass the guilty."

"I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too."

"There's nothing on Earth like really nailing the last line of a big book. You have 200 pages to tickle their fancy, and seven words to break their heart."

"Tell the story as if it were only of interest to the small circle of your characters, of which you may be one. There is no other way to put life into the story."

"When I write, I disturb. When I show a film, I disturb. When I exhibit my painting, I disturb, and I disturb if I don't. I have a knack for disturbing."

"If through no fault of his own the hero is crushed by a bulldozer in Act II, we are not impressed. Even though life is often like this—the absconding cashier on his way to Nicaragua is killed in a collision at the airport, the prominent statesman dies of a stroke in the midst of the negotiations he has spent years to bring about, the young lovers are drowned in a boating accident the day before their marriage—such events, the warp and woof of everyday life, seem irrelevant, meaningless. They are crude, undigested, unpurged bits of reality—to draw a metaphor from the late J. Edgar Hoover, they are “raw files.” But it is the function of great art to purge and give meaning to human suffering, and so we expect that if the hero is indeed crushed by a bulldozer in Act II there will be some reason for it, and not just some reason but a good one, one which makes sense in terms of the hero’s personality and action. In fact, we expect to be shown that he is in some way responsible for what happens to him."

"You can always edit a bad page. You can't edit a blank page."

"[Science fiction is] out in the mainstream now. You can tell by the way mainstream literary authors pillage SF while denying they're writing it!"