How could anyone survive even a single day, if he didn't feel as if he was, in some little great way, needed?
A brilliant mind was never as clever as three average minds sniffing after something of interest.
For honest insight into who you are, don't ask yourself what your priorities are for next week. Ask what your priorities were last week.
I'm astonished how little fright I have of my own imagination. It really does baffle me that I don't get more scared because I'm capable of thinking up things that are so awful. On any given day I can imagine the worst.
A community that learns together excels together. We need to form communities that learn together.
To improve as a player you need to not only know how you plan to win, but ... how might your opponent disrupt your plan.
I would like to say that I have software that allows me to model worlds to a high degree of scientific plausibility. I'd also like to be six foot two and fifteen years into my reign as Emperor of Europa. The simple truth is that past the character's name and a long history of making my own body cover distances, I did very little in the way of targeted research.
I live for those rare and delicious moments when the words on the page take off and I am the bystander, watching as the tale shows me what will happen next.
Science fiction is really a rather tiny business compared with its giant cousin, which is fantasy.
2001: A Space Odyssey was a wonderful conundrum when I was a boy, with its giant concepts thrown across the giant screen at Indian Hills Theater. That movie woke me up in ways that I hadn't imagined, and I went searching for book versions of the same drug.
A community is a small group working together. Community scales by adding groups, and building connections between them, not enlarging them.
The burden of intelligence: you can always imagine all those wonderful places where you can never belong.
I don't believe people let things slide away. It's the nature of the universe that everything dissolves into oblivion and by every route possible, but human beings invest a lot of cleverness trying to cling to past events, real or imagined. And because we can't succeed, we get angry and frustrated and feel guilty. Except the Buddhists.
I've always thought of science fiction as being, at some level, a 19th-century business.
This is a slow business to have success in. There are exceptions, but for the most part it's kind of like the last writer standing.... I've got gray. I've got plenty of gray. I'm creating a career slowly, like a coral reef.
In a novella, a whole lot of crap can happen, and you can build momentum and suspense and leave room for a surprise or three. Stories are cut down to the most essential elements, and novels (this might be an unfair generalization on my part) are big fat clumsy efforts where the reader can snooze for a couple chapters and miss nothing of consequence. Hence my love for the middle way.
I'm the only member of SFWA in Nebraska, but I don't pine away for the companionship of other science fiction writers. I [go] to very few conventions. I'm quite willing to be that eccentric who has a very odd job, quite happy to be the only science fiction writer in town.
I wrote when I was a young teen, but I didn't put an eye on the available markets until I was seventeen. The next ten years felt like a self-centered experiment in personal abuse.
Occasionally, I'll dream I'm in the factory. That will help me write. Not creatively, but more like a prod. I don't want to go back there.
A favorite science fiction writer of mine is William Faulkner! It was an idea that came to me once, years ago, and I've never quite been able to shake it. This is facetious, on one level at least. There are telepaths in As I Lay Dying. But I think the most compelling thing for me is there are moments with him where I just feel these are not humans talking to each other. These are some hyper-intelligent, yet-to-be-born organisms. The way they look at the past without having any loss of knowledge everything that ever happened is still here.
It has often been said that [...] the Japanese [are] geniuses at taking foreign ideas and adding a unique finishing touch.
Before I was reading science fiction, I read Hemingway. Farewell to Arms was my first adult novel that said not everything ends well. It was one of those times where reading has meant a great deal to me, in terms of my development - an insight came from that book.
I can't point to a moment or incident that made me see that this business, this putting down words on paper, was what I would do for the rest of my lucid life. But apparently, that is my calling.
