Top 98 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Fictioneers - Page 2

A cliché is dead matter. It causes gangrene in the prose around it, and sooner or later it eats your brain.

If you behave like a doormat, expect to be stepped on and don't complain about it.

If you ask 20 different readers why they read, they will all be right.

You cannot weave truth on a loom of lies.

A knife can be a symbol, but it also better be able to cut string. And if it represent cutting free, cutting loose, in the story’s beginning, it better not be used to prop up a bookcase and then forgotten later on.

Writers say many true things about their own experiences with publicity and promotion.

If there is no willingness to use force to defend civil society, it's civil society that goes away, not force.

There's a rule for what makes good fantasy work, and it's as strange as any riddle ever posed in a fairy tale: In fantasy, you can do anything; and therefore, the one thing you must not do is 'just anything.' Why? Because in a story where anything can happen and anything can be true, nothing matters. You have no reason to care what happens. It's all arbitrary, and arbitrary isn't interesting.

So many problems are solved simply by knowing enough verbs.

Just because you’re on their side doesn’t mean they’re on your side.

Lawyers will always buckle under to something, whether its bribes, violence, court orders, or the weight of their own bullshit.

Unresolved emotional pain is the great contagion of our time — of all time.

A friend told me of visiting the Dalai Lama in India and asking him for a succinct definition of compassion. She prefaced her question by describing how heart-stricken she'd felt when, earlier that day, she'd seen a man in the street beating a mangy stray dog with a stick. "Compassion," the Dalai Lama told her, "is when you feel as sorry for the man as you do for the dog."

It is strange how the presence of additional people can make you feel more alone.

(Home is) a place we carry inside ourselves, a place where we welcome the unfamiliar because we know that as time passes it will become the very bedrock of our being.

Once, at a seminar, I heard a Westernized lama say that a meditator's state of mind should be like that of a hotel doorman. A doorman lets the guests in, but he doesn't follow them up to their rooms. He lets them out, but he doesn't walk into the street with them to their next appointment. He greets them all, then lets them go on about their business. Meditation is, in its initial stages, simply accustoming oneself to letting thoughts come and go without grasping at their sleeves or putting up a velvet rope to keep them out.

Deliberate choices are the only sacred things in the universe. Everything else is just hydrogen.

I have to go make books. Sorry about that.

Jeffrey Carver imagines wonders and allows us to share his vision.

The words are not mere words. They are the breath and mind, perhaps even the soul, of the person who is reading.

This is what happens when the discourse of publishing, defined and driven by spoken and written language, is talked about in exactly the same vocabulary and syntax as any widgetmaking industry. Books are reformulated as 'product' - like screwdrivers or flea-bombs or soap - and the majority of writers are perceived as typists with bad attitudes.

For at the center of all spiritual traditions is the beacon of a truly radical proposal: Open your heart to everybody. Everybody.

Ah, but I am more perceptive than most of the universe. Especially the parts of the universe that are vacuum.

Flow is something the reader experiences, not the writer.

I hated relying on luck. When it worked, it made me feel so damned eerie.

Rumors are like lightning on summer tinder, producing flames that dance in flickering brilliance from person to person, sometimes flaring in great conflagrations of exaggeration before finally extinguishing themselves in the cold waters of fact.

We've got a good inspection system in Arizona managing products that come from other parts of the county that could carry insects that could become problematic.

Write from the soul, not from some notion what you think the marketplace wants. The market is fickle; the soul is eternal.

I look at the books on my library shelves. They certainly seem dormant. But what if the characters are quietly rearranging themselves? What if Emma Woodhouse doesn't learn from her mistakes? What if Tom Jones descends into a sodden life of poaching and outlawry? What if Eve resists Satan, remembering God's injunction and Adam's loving advice? I imagine all the characters bustling to get back into their places as they feel me taking the book down from the shelf. Hurry, they say, he'll expect to find us exactly where he left us, never mind how much his life has changed in the meantime.

I used to think that people who regarded everyone benignly were a mite simple or oblivious or just plain lax-until I tried it myself. Then I realized that they made it only look easy. Even the Berditchever Rebbe, revered as a man who could strike a rock and bring forth a stream, was continually honing his intentions. "Until I remove the thread of hatred from my heart," he said of his daily meditations, "I am, in my own eyes, as if I did not exist."

Zachary Jernigan's short stories are in deep conversation with the history of the genre while maintaining a thoroughly modern sensibility. Here’s a new writer who has found his voice. Listen to him and enjoy!

A Healing Dream can never be completely "interpreted," or fully understood. Healing Dreams want us to stop making sense; not just to crack the case, but to enter the mystery.

Not everyone can be a theologian, but everyone should know some theology.

When I say the grace of wildness, what I mean is its autonomy, its self-possession, the fact that it has nothing to do with us. The grace is in the separation, the distance, the sense of a self-sustaining way of life.

Oak trees come out of acorns, no matter how unlikely that seems. An acorn is just a tree's way back into the ground. For another try. Another trip through. One life for another.

Nelson Mandela once remarked that he befriended his jailers, those grim, khaki-clad overseers of his decades of hard labor in a limestone quarry, by "exploiting their good qualities." Asked if he believed all people were kind at their core, he responded, "There is no doubt whatsoever, provided you are able to arouse their inherent goodness." If that sounds like wishful thinking, well, he actually did it.

What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality that she thinks she'll get complex software right the first time?

The Golden Age of science fiction is thirteen.