“Isn’t the real question this: Is the work worth doing? Am I, a human being, working for what I really need and want—or for what the State or the advertisers tell me I want? Do I choose? I think that’s what anarchism comes down to. Do I let my choices be made for me, and so go along with the power game, or do I choose, and accept the responsibility for my choice? In other words, am I going to be a machine-part, or a human being?”
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“It may just be a refusal to take the counsel of despair. I think to admit despair and to revel in it―as many 20th- and 21st-century writers do―is an easy way out. Whenever I get really really depressed and discouraged about politics in America and what we are doing, ecologically speaking, globally speaking, [with] our mad rush to destroy the world, it’s very easy to say, ‘To hell with us. This species is not successful.’ Something tells me I have no right to say that. There are good people. Who am I to judge? The problem with despair is it gets judgemental.”
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“I have a rash piece of advice which is—Go on, page two, page three, and never look back. Get something finished, no matter how lousy it is. Then take it and tear it to pieces and squeeze it until the blood runs and rewrite it fifty times. But I think what you’ve got is perfectionism trouble, and perfectionists cannot get going unless they kind of do violence to their own instincts, and just blast ahead.”
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“I’ve tried to force myself to write. Just because I wasn’t writing, and it was time I wrote something. Well, it was a disaster. It has to come. Some of us are just at the mercy of our unconscious, I guess. And of course you control it, and of course you get work habits, and you learn that there is a tap you can turn on; you can sit down at your desk and you can write, if you’re working on something already. If the initial gift has been given to you, then it’s your job to write, and that’s work, and it takes discipline and so on. But with me, it is a gift, it isn’t just something I invent by myself. I wish I could. It’d be nice.”
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“There are times, like when I read about Lady Antonia Fraser, with her big books and her five children and fifteen nursemaids or whatever it is, that I feel a profound and evil envy. Or when I hear about some man who has quite a paying job to ‘devote himself to writing full time’—I get mean. I think, oh buddy. I wrote when I had jobs I got paid for; when I quit those, I still had a fulltime job, the kids and the house, and I still wrote. Who is doing your work for you, Mr. Fulltime Writer? Mrs. Fulltime Writer? And where are her novels?
If I was ‘free,’ as so many male writers have been free, I would be impoverished. Why should all my time be my own, just because I write books? There are human responsibilities, and those include responsibilities to daily life, to common human work. I mean, cleaning up, cooking, all the work that must be done over and over all one’s life, and also the school concert and the impossible geometry homework and so on. Responsibility is privilege. If you delegate that work to others, you’ve copped out of the very source of your writing, which after all is life, isn’t it, just living, people living and working and trying to get along.”
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“There is something about one’s body as it gets around seventy years old that induces—strongly—often imperatively—a shift from action to observation. Action at seventy tends to lead to a lot of saying ow, ow, ow. Observation, however, can be rewarding. As I have never been sure where my body leaves off and my mind begins or vice-versa, it seems unsurprising to me that the condition of one of them induces a similar condition in the other.”
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“The question of nostalgia deserves looking into. Much fantasy, and science fiction too, draws upon an apparently inalterable human longing for ‘the peaceable kingdom,’ the garden Voltaire suggested we cultivate. But terms must be used carefully and respectfully in such a discussion.
Any refusal to accept the abuse of the world by ill-considered, misapplied technologies as desirable/inevitable can be labelled Luddite. All genuine alternatives to Industrial Capitalism can be, and are, dismissed as ‘nostalgia.'”
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“Sometimes I think I am just trying superstitiously to avert evil by talking about it; I certainly don’t consider my fictions prophetic. Yet throughout my whole adult life, I have watched us blighting our world irrevocably, irremediably, and mindlessly—ignoring every warning and neglecting every benevolent alternative in the pursuit of ‘growth’ and immediate profit.”
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“How do you know who you are if you’re always with other people doing what they do?”
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“I have a website. I blog. I get email and send email. But I try to keep my distance. The internet just invites crap from people.”
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“If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell it to you again when you’re fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you’re reading a whole new book.”
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“I don’t expect to win, but I still need to say what I think. When I am afraid to say what I think is when I will really be defeated. The only way they can defeat me is by silencing me. I might as well go out kicking.”
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“I think a great many American men have been taught to repress their imaginations, to reject it as something childish or effeminate, unprofitable, and probably sinful.”
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“One of the troubles with our culture is we do not respect and train the imagination. It needs exercise. It needs practice. You can’t tell a story unless you’ve listened to a lot of stories and then learned how to do it.”
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“I’ll stop reading because either I’m existentially terrified or it’s just too scary. I get sent a lot of books to blurb. I look at them. And so many have a lot of high tension, a lot of suspense. I’ll get really scared, and then it will turn out to be the first book of a series. To hell with it. I don’t respond well to suspense. I hate it. I’ll look at the end of the story when I’m still at the beginning.”