Top 513 Quotes & Sayings by 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.

Working is hard and distracts from having fun.

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.

I listen to music constantly while writing.

I have lived in the only decades I could have lived in, and hope to live through at least a few more.

Unemployment is capitalism's way of getting you to plant a garden.

My college training was primarily in theatre, with an eye to becoming a director, actor, or producer.

Laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books.

You who speak languages, you are such liars.

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.

Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.

It's the middle class that feels the luxury of being able to have causes.

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.

In all my study of history, I have never found a time or place I would rather have lived than now.

Ulysses, obviously. It was an elaborate prank, and our supposed intellectual elite continue to fall for it.

I wonder sometimes if the motivation for writers ought to be contempt, not admiration.

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.

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.

I buy way too many books.

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.

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.

Among my most prized possessions are words that I have never spoken.

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.

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.

I hope I am remembered by my children as a good father.

Everything important in sci-fi showed up in the magazines first. It's the proving ground for new writers and new ideas.

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.

As long as you keep getting born, it's alright to die some times.

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.

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.

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.

There is more good writing and good acting in any ten minutes of Twister than in, say, all of Citizen Kane.

Your work is first, learning is first, winning is everything because without it there is nothing.

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.

To reach out to you when I'm in need, and to try to be here for you when you need me back. And to feel such tenderness when I look at you that I want to stand between you and all the world: and yet also to lift you up and carry you above the strong currents of life; and at the same time, I would be glad to stand always like this, at a distance, watching you, the beauty of you.

Everyone dies. Everyone leaves. What matters is the things you build together before they go. What matters is the part of them that continues in you when they're gone.

Andrew said you were the best person he ever knew." "He reached that conclusion before he saw me raise three barbarian children to adulthood. I understand your mother has six." "Right." "And you're the oldest." "Yes." "That's too bad. Parents always make their worst mistakes with the oldest children. That's when parents know the least and care the most, so they're more likely to be wrong and also more likely to insist that they're right.

If pigs could vote, the man with the slop bucket would be elected swineherd every time, no matter how much slaughtering he did on the side.

Every day people judge all other people. The question is whether they judge wisely.

It is a weak man who blames his failures on the strength of others.

She worked her toes into the sand, feeling the tiny delicious pain of the friction of tiny chips of silicon against the tender flesh between her toes. That's life. It hurts, it's dirty, and it feels very, very good.

Faith doesn't mean you never doubt. It only means you never act upon your doubts.

In order to learn, one must change one's mind.

Madness, and then illumination.

When there aren't any smart decisions, I suppose you just have to pick the stupid decision you like best.

The wise are not wise because they make no mistakes. They are wise because they correct their mistakes as soon as they recognize them.

When you really know somebody you can’t hate them. Or maybe it’s just that you can’t really know them until you stop hating them.

Do the gods of different nations talk to each other?...Is there some annual get-together where they compare each other's worshippers? Mine will bow their faces to the floor and trace woodgrain lines for me, says one. Mine will sacrifice animals, says another. Mine will kill anyone who insults me, says a third. Here is the question I think of most often: "Are there any who can honestly boast, My worshippers obey my good laws, and treat each other kindly, and live simple generous lives?

That's how it goes within a family. You think you know each other so well, and so you don't bother hardly getting to know each other at all.

And enough for me that when my hand touched your shoulder, you leaned on me; and when you felt me slip away, you called my name.

There are times when the world is rearranging itself, and at times like that, the right words can change the world.

Because never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along?the same person that I am today.

Changing the world is good for those who want their names in books. But being happy, that is for those who write their names in the lives of others, and hold the hearts of others as the treasure most dear.

When you have a good romance, find ways to make their lives miserable and hellish...Do you think 'Titanic' would have been so popular if they had both lived? Not a prayer.

We don't read novels to have an experience like life. Heck, we're living lives, complete with all the incompleteness. We turn to fiction to have an author assure us that it means something.

Happiness is not a life without pain, but rather a life in which the pain is traded for a worthy price.

there were crimes and quarrels, alongside kindness and cooperation; there were people who loved each other and people who did not; it was a human world.