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

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

incessant radical change, is not describable in a language that assumes continuity and a common experience of life.

We have been told that there is only one kind of people and they are men. And I think it is very important that we all believe that. It certainly is important to the men.

T’ai chi walking

The story is the way the story is told.

“mental representations of things not actually present,” so that we can form a judgment of what world we live in and where we might be going in it, what we can celebrate, what we must fear.

the word fantasy remains ambiguous, standing between the false, the foolish, the delusory, the shallows of the mind, and the mind’s deep connection with the real. On this threshold it sometimes faces one way, masked and costumed, frivolous, an escapist; then it turns, and we glimpse as it turns the face of an angel, bright truthful messenger, arise

Living in a world that is valued only as gain, an ever-expanding world-as-frontier that has no worth of its own, no fullness of its own, you live in danger of losing your own worth to yourself.

A poor reader can’t dance to the prose. But the best reader can’t make lame prose dance.