A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt.
A meaningless question has only meaningless answers.
[T]he only means I have to stop ignorant snobs from behaving towards genre fiction with snobbish ignorance is to not reinforce their ignorance and snobbery by lying and saying that when I write SF it...
You are rich, you own. We are poor, we lack. You have, we do not have. Everything is beautiful here. Only not the faces. On Anarres nothing is beautiful, nothing but the faces. The other faces, the me...
What was and what may be lie, like children whose faces we cannot see, in the arms of silence. All we have is here, now.
We are all dead, and we spoiled the world before we died. There is nothing left. Nothing but dreams.
This was the way he had to go; he had no choice. He had never had any choice. He was only a dreamer.
The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual,only evil interesting. This is the trea...
The king was pregnant.
The constrained body knows and values the freedom of the mind.
Some dreams tell us what we wish to believe. Some dreams tell us what we fear. Some dreams are of what we know though we may not know we know it. The rarest dream is the dream that tells us what we ha...
No, I don't understand him, but he is worth listening to.
He also had a kind of helpless politeness, which I took advantage of. He was quite incapable of refusing a direct request, and so, because I asked him to, he invited me to several parties during the m...
Belief in the lie is the life of the lie.
We need writers who know the difference between the production of a commodity and the practice of an art.
But you're so strong. I wish I were strong. I just like eating.
If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.
You don't speak of dreams as unreal. They exist. They leave a mark behind them.
To learn which questions are unanswerable, and : this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.
There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of...