Quotes by Orson Scott Card

About Orson Scott Card:

Orson Scott Card is an American novelist, critic, public speaker, essayist and columnist. He writes in several genres but is known best for science fiction. His novel Ender's Game (1985) and its sequel Speaker for the Dead (1986) both won Hugo and Nebula Awards, making Card the only author to win both science fiction's top U.S. prizes in consecutive years. A feature film adaptation of Ender's Game, which Card co-produced, was released in late October 2013 in Europe and on November 1, 2013, in North America.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

We don't read novels to have an experience like life. Heck, we're living lives, complete with all the incompleteness. We turn to fiction to have an author assure us that it means something.

Orson Scott Card

We care about moral issues, nobility, decency, happiness, goodness—the issues that matter in the real world, but which can only be addressed, in their purity, in fiction.

Orson Scott Card

Oh no, real life is escape. The great terrors, the horrors--we hope--of your life come from reading fiction.

Orson Scott Card

In America, film is the highest form of art that the public aspires to. People will come to me and say ‘Oh, your book was so good, they ought to make a movie out of it!’ To which I reply ‘Well, why? It’s already a book.

Orson Scott Card

Ethan Wyeth: I hope you're thirsty." Gideon Wyeth:"Why?" Ethan: "Cause your dumb and ugly, but I can do something about thirsty.

Orson Scott Card

Human: That's stupid. Isn't there grass on both sides?

Orson Scott Card

I don't care how much you eat, Ender, self-cannibalism won't get you out of this school.

Orson Scott Card

Ulysses was an elaborate prank, and our supposed intellectual elite continue to fall for it.

Orson Scott Card

She had always thought that if only people could communicate mind-to-mind, eliminating the ambiguities of language, then understanding would be perfect and there'd be no more needless conflicts. Instead she had discovered that rather than magnifying ...

Orson Scott Card

If you did not in your own mind distinguish between useful and erroneous information, then you were not learning at all, you were merely replacing ignorance with false belief, which was no improvement.

Orson Scott Card

You take a step, then another. That’s the journey. But to take a step with your eyes open is not a journey at all, it’s a remaking of your own mind.

Orson Scott Card

My goal was that the reader wouldn't have to be trained in literature or even in science fiction to receive the tale in its simplest, purest form. And, since a great many writers and critics have based their entire careers on the premise that anythin...

Orson Scott Card

As often I have been a science fiction writer writing science fiction for the community of science fiction readers, I am also, for good or ill, an American writing American literature to an American audience. Most fundamentally, though, I am a human ...

Orson Scott Card

Music isn't just a pleasure, a transient satisfaction. It's a need, a deep hunger; and when the music is right, it's joy. Love. A foretaste of heaven. A comfort in grief. Is it too much to think that perhaps God speaks to us sometimes through music? ...

Orson Scott Card

If the followers of the Oversoul are kept blind, if they can't judge the Oversoul's purpose for themselves, then they aren't freely choosing between good and evil, or between wise and foolish, but are only choosing to subsume themselves in the purpos...

Orson Scott Card

I can see by your face that I'll never persuade you. And that's surprising, because usually you at least try to see my side." I can see your side," said Cecily. "I've got a much clearer view of it than you do, from over here on my side.

Orson Scott Card

Stories are invented as you go along...

Orson Scott Card

He spent the afternoon alone in the streets.

Orson Scott Card

Since we are not yet fully comfortable with the idea that people from the next village are as human as ourselves, it is presumptuous in the extreme to suppose we could ever look at sociable, tool-making creatures who arose from other evolutionary pat...

Orson Scott Card

That's what Ender has to understand. There really is evil in the world, and wickedness, and every brand of stupidity. There's meanness and heartlessness and... I don't even know which of them is me." - Hyrum Graff

Orson Scott Card

You honor our humble abode,' said Bean. 'I do, don't I,' said Peter with a smile.

Orson Scott Card

Author Bio

  • NameOrson Scott Card
  • DescriptionScience fiction novelist
  • BornAugust 24, 1951
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionWriter; Novelist
  • WorksEnder's Game Hexalogy; The Tales Of Alvin Maker Heptalogy
  • AwardsMargaret Edwards Award; Nebula Award; Hugo Award