Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.
Belief is the wound that knowledge heals.
[H.G. Wells said] that his method was "to trick his reader into an unwary concession to some plausible assumption and get on with his story while the illusion holds." Such prestidigitation is a charac...
The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last d...
…what I told them was 'a poem,' a thing made by a maker, a work of art, part history of long ago, part invention.
Without war there are no heroes.What harm would that be?Oh, Lavinia, what a woman's question that is.
Without language, they have no lies. Thus they have no future.
Where does your soul go when you die in Hell?
To make a thief, make an owner; to create crime, create laws.
Time says Let there beevery moment and instantlythere is space and the radianceof each bright galaxy.And eyes beholding radiance.And the gnats’ flickering dance.
Those who build walls are their own prisoners.
This was a great magic. Festin had no more performed it than has any man who in exile or danger longs for the earth and waters of his home, seeing and yearning over the doorsill of his house, the tabl...
There is no kingdom like the forests. It is time I went there, went in silence, went alone. And maybe there I would learn at last what no act or art or power can teach me, what I have never learned.
The word power has two different meanings. There is power to: strength, gift, skill, art, the mastery of a craft, the authority of knowledge. And there is power over: rule, dominion, supremacy, might,...
The winds and seas, the powers of water and earth an light, all that these do, and all that the beasts and green things do, is well done, and rightly done. All these act within the Equilibrium. From t...
The weather bureau will tell you what next Tuesday will be like, and the Rand Corporation will tell you what the twenty-first century will be like. I don’t recommend that you turn to the writers of fi...
The purpose of a thought-experiment, as the term was used by Schrödinger and other physicists, is not to predict the future - indeed Schrödinger most famous thought experiment goes to show that the fu...
The natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular,...
The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.
The duty of the individual is to accept no rule, to be the initiator of his own acts, to be responsible. Only if he does so will the society live, and change, and adapt, and survive. We are not subjec...