Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places

Effective works of fantasy are distinguished by their often relentless accuracy of detail, by their exactness of imagination, by the coherence and integrity of their imagined worlds—by, precisely, their paradoxical truthfulness.

a person taught by her society to perceive herself as a born loser is going to find it hard to feel like a winner.

“Don’t ask me!” snaps the imagination. “I could think up a dozen better arrangements before breakfast! But who listens to me?”

He is not my wife; but he brought to marriage an assumption of mutual aid as its daily basis, and on that basis you can get a lot of work done.

Anyhow, what the hell is nostalgia doing in a science-fiction film? With the whole universe and all the future to play in, Lucas took his marvelous toys and crawled under the fringed cloth on the parlor table, back into a nice safe hideyhole, along with Flash Gordon and the Cowardly Lion and Huck Skywalker and the Flying Aces and the Hitler Jugend.

A culture or a psychology predicated upon man as human and woman as other cannot accept a woman as artist.

The artist with the least access to social or aesthetic solidarity or approbation has been the artist-housewife. A person who undertakes responsibility both to her art and to her dependent children, with no “tireless affection” or even tired affection to call on, has undertaken a full-time double job that can be simply, practically, destroyingly im

That, of course, is the power of the script: you play the part without knowing it.

Writers have to get used to launching something beautiful and watching it crash and burn.