Women are a very recent invention. I predate the invention of women by decades. Well, if you insist on pedantic accuracy, women have been invented several times in widely varying localities, but the i...
While we read a novel, we are insane - bonkers.
While I’m reading a story I want to be able to suspend disbelief; the more questions of authorial reliability force themselves on me, the weaker the hold of the narrative. This is a naïve approach to...
Where, then, is Truth? declaimed Bedap, and yawned. In the hill one happens to be sitting on, said Tirin.
When asked to define the difference between fantasy and science fiction, I mouth and mumble and always end up talking about the spectrum, that very useful spectrum, along which one thing shades into a...
What is the Meaning of this book, this event in the book, this story . . . ? Tell me what it Means. But that’s not my job, honey. That’s your job.
What is it like to return from the dead? Not easy. Not for the one who returns, nor for his people. The place he occupied in their world has closed up, ceased to be, filled with accumulated change, ha...
What good seeking the safe course, on a journey such as this? There are senseless courses, which I shall not take; but there is no safe one. Streth
Wealth, status, pride, are their own ruin. To do good, work well, and lie low is the way of the blessing.
We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom. We cannot demand that anyone try to attain justice and freedom who has not had a chan...
We have created crime, just as the propertarians did. We force a man outside the sphere of our approval, and then condemn him for it. We’ve made laws, laws of conventional behavior, built walls all ar...
We broke the world to make it whole...
Ultimately you write alone. And ultimately you and you alone can judge your work. The judgment that a work is complete—this is what I meant to do, and I stand by it—can come only from the writer, and...
Todos tenemos que aprender a inventarnos una vida, crearla, imaginarla. Necesitamos que nos enseñen esas capacidades; necesitamos guías que nos muestren cómo hacerlo. Si no lo hacemos nuestras vidas a...
To die is to lose the self and rejoin the rest.
To break a rule you have to know the rule. A blunder is not a revolution.
To be the man he can be, Ged has to find out who and what his real enemy is. He has to find out what it means to be himself. That requires not a war but a search and a discovery. The search takes him...
To be reborn one must die, Tenar. It is not so hard as it looks from the other side.
Though I had been nearly two years on Winter I was still far from being able to see the people of the planet through their own eyes. I tried to, but my efforts took the form of self-consciously seeing...
This weight of verifiable place-event-phenomenon-behavior makes the reader forget that he is reading a pure invention, a history that never took place anywhere but in that unlocalizable region, the au...