Every fairy tale, it seems, concludes with the bland phrase "happily ever after." Yet every couple I have ever known would agree that nothing about marriage is forever happy. There are moments of bliss, to be sure, and lengthy spans of satisfied comp...
I had depressing thoughts that the theme, even though I had thought of it, was better than I was as a writer. Henry James or Thomas Mann could easily write it, but not I. 'I'm thinking of writing it from the point of view of someone at the hotel who ...
When you read the account of a murder - or, say, a fiction story based on murder - you usually begin with the murder itself. That's all wrong. The murder begins a long time beforehand. A murder is the culmination of a lot of different circumstances, ...
Language is music. Written words are musical notation. The music of a piece of fiction establishes the way in which it is to be read, and, in the largest sense, what it means. It is essential to remember that characters have a music as well, a pitch ...
As a young man just beginning to publish some short fiction in the t&a magazines, I was fairly optimistic about my chances of getting published; I knew that I had some game, as the basketball players say these days, and I also felt that time was on m...
My gosh," I said, "another human being." "You'll never know how human," she said. "Maybe I will," I said. "I could try." I did try, and I do try, and I give you the toast of a happy man: May the warm springs of the girl pool never run dry. --"Girl Po...
Her pleasure went on and on, and so did Ben's. Ben could almost smell the gardenia, could almost see her pinning it on, her hands all thumbs. "You're selling your store?" she said. There was radiance between them now. There were overtones and underto...
I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian god may exist; so may the gods of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is more probable th...
All we are, all we can be, are the stories we tell," he says, and he is talking as if he is talking only to me. "Long after we are gone, our words will be all that is left, and who is to say what really happened or even what reality is? Our stories, ...
Murder, other than in the most strict forensic sense, is never soluble. That dark human clot can never melt into a lucid, clear suspension. Our detective fiction tells us otherwise: everything is just meat and cold ballistics. Provide a murderer, a m...
The fact is that the modern implementation of the prison planet has far surpassed even ’s and the only difference between our society and those fictionalized by Huxley, Orwell and others, is that the advertising techniques used to package the propa...
Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy then gives them the drugs to take away their unhappiness. Science fiction It is already happening to some extent in our own society. Instead of removing the conditio...
We have too much respect for the printed word, too little awareness of the power words hold over us. We allow worlds to be conjured up for us with very little concern for the implications. We overlook glaring incongruities. We are suckers for alliter...
Yet the experience of reading a novel has certain qualities that remind us of the traditional apprehension of mythology. It can be seen as a form of meditation. Readers have to live with a novel for days or even weeks. It projects them into another w...
Freedom is not defined by safety. Freedom is defined by the ability of citizens to live without government interference. Government cannot create a world without risks, nor would we really wish to live in such a fictional place. Only a totalitarian s...
Write in pictures. With your words, let the reader see not letters, but images. Be specific about every detail, but don't describe it--make it happen on the page, if you were writing fiction, or make it happen over again, if you were writing about hi...
Should the research worker of the future discover some means of releasing this [atomic] energy in a form which could be employed, the human race will have at its command powers beyond the dream of scientific fiction, but the remotest possibility must...
How are you supposed to know what to read next? This is the question that keeps us up at night, so at Day One our mission is to feed an audience of literature-hungry, time-constrained readers like you with a weekly lineup of talented authors, poets, ...
Tethered to the universe by tendrils of history, with threads of continuity descending to God knows where, I see that I'm more than the dust I'll become." This quote is from my novel, "Whispers from St. Mary's Well." Many readers have said that, like...
The great majority of us are required to live a constant, systematic duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected by it if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, you grovel before what you dislike and rejoice at what bring brings yo...
Ernesto Guevara de la Serna: Even though we are too insignificant to be spokesmen for such a noble cause, we believe, and this journey has only confirmed this belief, that the division of American into unstable and illusory nations is a complete fict...
