“It is rare for people to be asked the question which puts them squarely in front of themselves”
“O love, O fire! once he drew With one long kiss my whole soul through My lips, as sunlight drinketh dew.”
“All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.”
“O how incomprehensible everything was, and actually sad, although it was also beautiful. One knew nothing. One lived and ran about the earth and rode through forests, and certain things looked so challenging and promising and nostalgic: a star in the evening, a blue harebell, a reed-green pond, the eye of a person or a cow. And sometimes it seemed that something never seen yet long desired was about to happen, that a veil would drop from it all, but then it passed, nothing happened, the riddle remained unsolved, the secret spell unbroken, and in the end one grew old and looked cunning . . . or wise . . . and still one knew nothing perhaps, was still waiting and listening.”
“Among the Igbo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten.”
“High and fine literature is wine, and mine is only water; but everybody likes water.”
“There are words and words and none mean anything. And then one sentence means everything.”
“There is nothing which can better deserve our patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.”
“When people dis fantasy—mainstream readers and SF readers alike—they are almost always talking about one sub-genre of fantastic literature. They are talking about Tolkien, and Tolkien s innumerable heirs. Call it epic , or high , or genre fantasy, this is what fantasy has come to mean. Which is misleading as well as unfortunate. Tolkien is the wen on the arse of fantasy literature. His oeuvre is massive and contagious—you can t ignore it, so don t even try. The best you can do is consciously try to lance the boil. And there s a lot to dislike—his cod-Wagnerian pomposity, his boys-own-adventure glorying in war, his small-minded and reactionary love for hierarchical status-quos, his belief in absolute morality that blurs moral and political complexity. Tolkien s clichés—elves n dwarfs n magic rings—have spread like viruses. He wrote that the function of fantasy was consolation , thereby making it an article of policy that a fantasy writer should mollycoddle the reader. That is a revolting idea, and one, thankfully, that plenty of fantasists have ignored. From the Surrealists through the pulps—via Mervyn Peake and Mikhael Bulgakov and Stefan Grabiński and Bruno Schulz and Michael Moorcock and M. John Harrison and I could go on—the best writers have used the fantastic aesthetic precisely to challenge, to alienate, to subvert and undermine expectations. Of course I m not saying that any fan of Tolkien is no friend of mine—that would cut my social circle considerably. Nor would I claim that it s impossible to write a good fantasy book with elves and dwarfs in it—Michael Swanwick s superb Iron Dragon s Daughter gives the lie to that. But given that the pleasure of fantasy is supposed to be in its limitless creativity, why not try to come up with some different themes, as well as unconventional monsters? Why not use fantasy to challenge social and aesthetic lies? Thankfully, the alternative tradition of fantasy has never died. And it s getting stronger. Chris Wooding, Michael Swanwick, Mary Gentle, Paul di Filippo, Jeff VanderMeer, and many others, are all producing works based on fantasy s radicalism. Where traditional fantasy has been rural and bucolic, this is often urban, and frequently brutal. Characters are more than cardboard cutouts, and they re not defined by race or sex. Things are gritty and tricky, just as in real life. This is fantasy not as comfort-food, but as challenge. The critic Gabe Chouinard has said that we re entering a new period, a renaissance in the creative radicalism of fantasy that hasn t been seen since the New Wave of the sixties and seventies, and in echo of which he has christened the Next Wave. I don t know if he s right, but I m excited. This is a radical literature. It s the literature we most deserve.”
“My definition of good literature is that which can be read by an educated reader, and reread with increased pleasure.”
“Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down: there are still so many stories to be told.”
“A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.”
“In life there are two things which are dependable. The pleasures of the flesh and the pleasures of literature.”
“So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it s the hardest to do anything with. That s about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what.”
“The most complicated skill is to be simple.”
“I have grown weary of literature: silence alone comforts me. If I continue to write, it’s because I have nothing more to accomplish in this world except to wait for death. Searching for the word in darkness. Any little success invades me and puts me in full view of everyone. I long to wallow in the mud. I can scarcely control my need for self-abasement, my craving for licentiousness and debauchery. Sin tempts me, forbidden pleasures lure me. I want to be both pig and hen, then kill them and drink their blood.”
“If any man wish to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts; and if any would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul.”