There’s nothing more embarrassing than to have earned the disfavor of a perceptive animal.
The whole house seemed to exhale a melancholy breath of emptiness
I agreed to keep the cards a secret and asked my grandmother if she believed in magic. She said she did not but that, surprisingly, magic worked even if you did not believe in it.
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.
All at once he feels weary of ganefs and prophets, guns and sacrifices and the infinite gangster weight of God. He’s tired of hearing about the promised land and the inevitable bloodshed required for its redemption.
I said that I had heard curiosity could be harmful, in particular to cats
People with Books. What, in 2007, could be more incongruous than that? It makes me want to l
I was conscious, then, of a different ache, deeper and more sharp than the feeling of bereavement that a hangover will sometimes uncover in the heart.
The city was new again, and newly dangerous, and I would walk the streets quickly, eyes averted from those of passersby, like a spy in the employ of lust and happiness, carrying the secret deep within me but always on the tip of my tongue.
There was something unmistakably exultant about the mess that Rosa had made. Her bedroom-studio was at once the canvas, journal, museum, and midden of her life. She did not “decorate” it; she infused it.
Every future we imagine is transformed inexorably into a part of our children’s understanding of their past, of the assumptions their parents and grandparents could not help but make.The Killer Hook
Badass.'” My grandfather sampled the flavor of the word. It did not seem to revolt him, but it was nothing he needed ever to sample again.
… remembered summer light, and the luminous inverted ghost of a boy with a parrot on his shoulder.
Take care-there is no force more powerful than that of an unbridled imagination.
In any case, it is not love, but friendship, that truly eludes you.
A story begins with this nebulous feeling that’s hard to get a hold of and you’re testing your feelings and assumptions, testing what you believe. They end up turning into keepsakes and mementos—like amber in which a memory gets trapped.
For the first time in a very many years, he felt the old vexation, the mingled impatience and pleasure at the world’s beautiful refusal to yield up its mysteries without a fight.
A mere redrawing of borders, a change in governments, those things can never faze a Jewess with a good supply of hand wipes in her bag.
I reflected that it seemed to be in the nature of human beings to spend the first part of their lives mocking the cliches and conventions of their elders and the final part mocking the cliches and conventions of the young.
A smile opened, thin as a paper cut, in the bottom of Flowers’s face.
It was him, thirty years too old, twenty pounds too light, & forty watts too dim maybe, but him.
He felt, and not for the first time today, that he had not made a good decision in his personal or professional life since 1989.
Finally I reached into my pocket and flipped a quarter. Heads was Phlox, tails was Arthur. It came up heads. I called Arthur.
this one-way rocket to Death in Adulthood” “Normal Time” in New California Writing
Although it wasn’t raining anymore, the air was still heavy with water, and rain gutters were ringing all over Point Breeze.
He could not shake the feeling – reportedly common among ghosts – that it was not he but those he haunted whose lives were devoid of matter, sense, future.
Miracles prove nothing except to those whose faith is bought very cheap, sir.
[His coat] emitted an odor of bus station so desolate that just standing next to him you could feel your luck changing for the worse.
He looked so profoundly disappointed in me that I wondered for a moment if he was someone I knew.
As long as she was falling in love with me, I might as well start making her promises I didn’t intend to keep.
The day you ever have that much control over my behavior, it will be because somebody’s asking you, should she get the pine box or a plain white shroud?
He was through with this conversation. As a rule, they tended to avoid questions like “How sane are we?” and “Do our lives have meaning?” The need for avoidance was acute and apparent to both of them.
As soon as I read that, it clicked: that’s my theater of war. It was exciting to think that I could write about World War Two from a totally new place.
Louis Pasteur said, ‘Chance favors the prepared mind.’ If you’re really engaged in the writing, you’ll work yourself out of whatever jam you find yourself in.
When I was in my early to mid-teens, that was a very heavy diet of science fiction and fantasy, so those were the kinds of books I tended to imagine writing someday, or even began to try to write.