Great Throughts Treasury

"I"

"If you don't like what you're doing, then don't do it."

"If you can't read and write you can't think. Your thoughts are dispersed if you don't know how to read and write. You've got to be able to look at your thoughts on paper and discover what a fool you were."

"If we listened to our intellect we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go in business because we'd be cynical: It's gonna go wrong. Or She's going to hurt me. Or,I've had a couple of bad love affairs, so therefore . . . Well, that's nonsense. You're going to miss life. You've got to jump off the cliff all the time and build your wings on the way down."

"If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none."

"If you dream the proper dreams, and share the myths with people, they will want to grow up to be like you."

"If you enjoy living, it is not difficult to keep the sense of wonder."

"If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you'll never learn."

"I'll hold on to the world tight someday. I've got one finger on it now; that's a beginning."

"If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories "

"If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like old faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape."

"I'm being ironic. Don't interrupt a man in the midst of being ironic, it's not polite."

"In touch! There's a slimy phrase. Touch, hell. Gripped! Pawed, rather. Mauled and massaged and pounded by FM voices."

"Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage."

"It is good to renew one's wonder, said the philosopher. Space travel has again made children of us all."

"I'm seventeen and I'm crazy. My uncle says the two always go together. When people ask your age, he said, always say seventeen and insane."

"It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime."

"Is it because we're having so much fun at home we've forgotten the world? Is it because we're so rich and the rest of the world's so poor and we just don't care if they are? I've heard rumors; the world is starving, but we're well fed. Is it true, the world works hard and we play? Is that why we're hated so much?"

"Jump, and you will find out how to unfold your wings as you fall"

"I've done a prideful thing, a thing more sinful than she ever done to me. I took the bottom out of her life."

"Just write every day of your life. Read intensely. Then see what happens. Most of my friends who are put on that diet have very pleasant careers."

"Let the world burn through you. Throw the prism light, white hot, on paper."

"Joy is the grace we say to God."

"Leave off losings, and take on winnings, Erase all mortal ends, give birth to only new beginnings, In a billion years of morning and a billion years of sleep."

"Learning to let go should be learned before learning to get. Life should be touched, not strangled. You"

"Life is trying things to see if they work."

"Like every beginner, I have thought you could beat, pummel and thrash an idea into existence. Under such treatment, of course, any decent idea folds up its paws, turns on its back, fixes its eyes on eternity, and dies."

"Life is like underwear, should be changed twice a day."

"Living at risk is jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down."

"Love is easy, and I love writing. You can't resist love. You get an idea, someone says something, and you're in love."

"Locked into everything is a mystery. We then try to find, in any given age as writers, the truths that we grew up with. You cannot grow up in a period and not be a child of your time."

"Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for."

"Love is the answer to everything. It's the only reason to do anything. If you don't write stories you love, you'll never make it. If you don't write stories that other people love, you'll never make it."

"My job is to help you fall in love."

"Man warring on himself an old tale is; But Man discovering the source of all his sorrow in himself, Finding his left hand and his right are similar sons, are children fighting In the porchyards of the void?!"

"Marriage made people old and familiar, while still young."

"My stories run up and bite me in the leg "

"My stories run up and bite me in the leg -- I respond by writing them down - everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off."

"Mysteries abound where most we seek for answers."

"Only six months ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel which, after all, deals with the censorship and book-burning in the future, wrote to tell me of this exquisite irony. Judy-Lynn Del Rey, one of the new Ballantine editors, is having the entire book reset and republished this summer with all the damns and hells back in place."

"Oh, ancient god, whatever your name, whispered Ahmed. Help this lost son of a good father, this evil boy who meant no harm but slept in school, ran errands slowly, did not pray from his heart, ignored his mother, and did not hold his family in great esteem. For all this I know I must suffer. But here in the midst of silence, at the desert's heart, where even the wind knows not my name? Must I die so young? Am I to be forgotten without having been?"

"People ask me to predict the future, when all I want to do is prevent it. Better yet, build it. Predicting the future is much too easy, anyway. You look at the people around you, the street you stand on, the visible air you breathe, and predict more of the same. To hell with more. I want better."

"Remember: Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations. Plot is observed after the fact rather than before. It cannot precede action. It is the chart that remains when an action is through. That is all Plot ever should be. It is human desire let run, running, and reaching a goal. It cannot be mechanical. It can only be dynamic."

"Recreate the world in your own image and make it better for your having been here."

"Remember the firemen are rarely necessary. The public stopped reading of its own accord."

"Science fiction is the most important literature in the history of the world, because it's the history of ideas, the history of our civilization birthing itself. ...Science fiction is central to everything we've ever done, and people who make fun of science fiction writers don't know what they're talking about."

"So few want to be rebels anymore. And out of those few, most, like myself, scare easily."

"Science-fiction balances you on the cliff. Fantasy shoves you off."

"Science fiction is a wonderful hammer; I intend to use it when and if necessary, to bark a few shins or knock a few heads, in order to make people leave people alone."

"So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all."