Brian Aldiss
Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name.
When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults.
Whatever creativity is, it is in part a solution to a problem.
Keep violence in the mind where it belongs.
It is comparatively easy to become a writer; staying a writer, resisting formulaic work, generating one's own creativity - that's a much tougher matter.
I'm lucky that SFWA has such a short memory. I was always the Young Turk, the gadfly. Part of the New Wave, although I didn't fit in there either! I spent years, and two histories, putting the so-called Old Guard in their place, and now I'm one of them!
I can't help believing that these things that come from the subconscious mind have a sort of truth to them. It may not be a scientific truth, but it's psychological truth.
I am a writer and always was; being a writer is an integral part of my identity. Being published, being well regarded, is a component of that identity.
Feedback is a pleasant thing. I get a lot of letters from unexpected people in unexpected places.
Civilization is the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta.