Justin Lancy

People worship power in the form in which they are able to understand it.

You cannot be a magician in stories if you are not a magician in life.

The more we are asked to adapt to the biases of our machinery, the less human we become.

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

Good stories tend us towards clarity and transcendence.

Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself. Leo Tolstoy

do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself.

I pay a lot of attention to place in my writing, so when I arrive in a new town I try to do what Lawrence Durrell recommended in his essay “Spirit of Place,” which is to get still as a needle, as he puts it. [“It is a pity indeed to travel and not get this essential sense of landscape values. You do not need a sixth sense for it. It is there if you