Mr. Casamonaca nodded genially and made a looping benedictory gesture in the air, just in front of his face, more ornate than a cross, as if he were a priest in a sect whose symbol was the holy coat h...
Most science fiction seemed to be written for people who already liked science fiction; I wanted to write stories for anyone, anywhere, living at any time in the history of the world.
Midwives’ experience of fathers is incidental but proficient, like a farmer’s knowledge of bird migration or the behavior of clouds.
Mendel had a remarkable nature as a boy. I’m not talking about miracles. Miracles are a burden for a tzaddik, not the proof of one. Miracles prove nothing except to those whose faith is bought very ch...
Long life wore away everything that was not essential.
In order to destroy the world, it becomes necessary to save it.
I wasn't unkind to him. I just didn't talk to him. I didn't talk to anybody, and I didn't want anybody talking to me. That was the plan.
I said, I need to hear something that’s going to save my life.Re: Selecting songs from a jukebox.
Gibson Goode to Archy: You're just being stubborn now. Stubbornness in the service of a mistaken notion is a vanity and a sin.
Do what you gotta do and stay fly
As he watched Joe stand, blazing, on the fire escape, Sammy felt an ache in his chest that turned out to be, as so often occurs when memory and desire conjoin with a transient effect of weather, the p...
And that was when you realized the fire was inside you all the time. And that was the miracle. Just that.
All of the dissatisfactions he had felt in his practice of the art form he had stumbled across within a week of his arrival in America, the cheap conventions, the low expectations among publishers, re...
There had been times in the past when my sister-in-law’s counsel, while never useful, had provided a certain amount of welcome bemusement, like the advice of an oracular hen.
The labels had been lettered lovingly; his father had always expressed that emotion best through troubling with details.
On balance, most of the time, in the ordinary course of life, it was probably best to say what was in your heart, to share what was on your mind, to tell the people you loved that you loved them, to a...
Let’s blow their little minds. A mind is not blown, in spite of whatever Hollywood seems to teach, merely by action sequences, things exploding, thrilling planetscapes, wild bursts of speed. Those are...
Knowing he had done wrong, prepared to make amends, settle his business. Determined to return to Brokeland, open the doors wide to the angel of retail death, and run the place into the ground all by h...
It was not an inordinately large ass, yet the heft of it seemed to connect him to an immense source of gravitation, one for which he was belatedly grateful, as though for a long time he had been weigh...
It reassured me that, if nothing else in life, at least I’d fulfilled my earliest ambition simply to wander far afield, in spirit if not in space, from the place of my birth.