The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination

The technology is not what matters. Words are what matter. The sharing of words. The activation of imagination through the reading of words.

the global, intuitional language of fantasy to describe, as accurately as they can, the way “we” live “now.”

The story is the way the story is told.

“You have nothing to lose but your chains,” but we prefer to kiss them.

What luck for a child to meet such a soul when she is young. What luck for a country to have a Mark Twain in its heart.

After all, fiction writers make a reality of words. The arts of writing all begin in playing with words, wallowing in them, revelling in them, being obsessed by them, finding reality in them. Words are the mud this mudpie’s made of. Some writers are cool and masterful and never get their hands dirty, but Cordwainer Smith got muddy from the toes to

by letting Eve and Adam cast themselves out of Eden without any help at all from him, and really none from the serpent either—to put sin and salvation, love and death in our own hands, as our own, strictly human business, our responsibility—now

The limits of that language—shared assumptions of class, culture, education, ethics—both focus and shrink the scope of the fiction.

If there are frontiers between the civilised and the barbaric, between the meaningful and the unmeaning, they are not lines on a map nor are they regions of the earth. They are boundaries of the mind alone.

And yet I see that though we love freedom we are mostly patient of oppression, and even refuse deliverance. I see a danger in insisting that our love of freedom always outweighs whatever force or inertia keeps us from resisting oppression and seeking deliverance. If I deny that strong, intelligent, capable people will and do accept oppression, I’m