“What good is music? None … and that is the point. To the world and its states and armies and factories and Leaders, music says, ‘You are irrelevant’; and, arrogant and gentle as a god, to the suffering man it says only, ‘”

All of us have to learn how to invent our lives , make them up, imagine them.

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 decades, even centuries.

The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.

Hardly anybody ever writes anything nice about introverts. Extroverts rule. This is rather odd when you realise that about nineteen writers out of twenty are introverts.

Well, we think that time “passes,” flows past us, but what if it is we who move forward, from past to future, always discovering the new? It would be a little like reading a book, you see.

The mountains clench their great hands full of hidden fire. There are sharks in the sea, and there is cruelty in men’s eyes.

Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one.

If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself.

To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention.

But it is one thing to read about dragons and another to meet them.

It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.

I don’t think ‘science fiction’ is a very good name for it, but it’s the name that we’ve got. It is different from other kinds of writing, I suppose, so it deserves a name of its own.

A panda walks into a tea room and ordered a salad and ate it. Then it pulled out a pistol, shot the man in the next table dead, and walked out.

There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.

as a writer you are free. You are about the freest person that ever was. Your freedom is what you have bought with your solitude, your loneliness.

Grieving, like being blind, is a strange business; you have to learn how to do it. We seek company in mourning, but after the early bursts of tears, after the praises have been spoken, and the good days remembered, and the lament cried, and the grave closed, there is no company in grief. It is a burden borne alone.