To teach a man how he may learn to grow independently, and for himself, is perhaps the greatest service that one man can do another.
Research! A mere excuse for idleness; it has never achieved, and will never achieve any results of the slightest value.
The rival ideologies of the left and right are both pining for the 50s. The only difference is that liberals want to work there, while conservatives want to go home there.
It's lonely to listen to the pleasure of others, not that I've made a habit of that kind of eavesdropping. There's joy and passion in the next room, in the next bed, but it's not yours.
Although computer memory is no longer expensive, there's always a finite size buffer somewhere. When a big piece of news arrives, everybody sends a message to everybody else, and the buffer fills.
Grace is sufficient even though we huff and puff with all our might to try and find something or someone that it cannot cover. Grace is enough.
Peggy Atwood, Alice Munro, Hugh Hood, Michael Ondaatje - these are all old friends from my early 20s.
Fantasy gets a mixed reception - a lot of fantasy is formulaic but most of the award-winning fantasy on the contrary tends to be the stuff at the edges of the genre, rather than swimming in the middle.
Repression in the human psyche is tightly bundled. When it has been pulled out of the sprung package so often it is perhaps difficult to push it back in the box.
Our literary culture is marinated in deep traditions of the fantastic and the supernatural, and we export those rich qualities in films and books on a spectacular industrial scale.
It was luxuries like air conditioning that brought down the Roman Empire. With air conditioning their windows were shut, they couldn't hear the barbarians coming.
A girl in a bikini is like having a loaded pistol on your coffee table - There's nothing wrong with them, but it's hard to stop thinking about it.
Hurry up! Do it – get it done. You got work to do. Don’t put this off and don’t take the long view. Life is today and tomorrow, and if you are lucky, may be next week.
A girl in a bikini is like having a loaded gun on your coffee table- There's nothing wrong with them, but it's hard to stop thinking about.
Anyone who thinks sitting in church can make you a Christian must also think that sitting in a garage can make you a car.
Just because we're fictional characters doesn't mean you can pick us up and move us anywhere you want.--the people of Lake Woebegon
Without a computer, every point on a structure has to be calculated with reference to everything else. But by using a PC, I can create complex curves that don't have radii or centers.
I never find myself even catching lyrics until something in the sound has taken me captive. Thinking about anything else is just the pleasurable byproduct of wow.
Good art is always dangerous, always open-ended. Once you put it out in the world you lose control of it; people will fit it into their minds in all sorts of different ways.
No one really has the guts to say it, but if we could make better human beings by knowing how to add genes, why shouldn't we?
The only things standing between you and the compassionate, wise, and creative person you want to be are matters of choice. Your choice. No one can occupy your generosity except you.
