Quotes
I met a nice little boy named Nick. (He's not quite so little now.) He was very, very bright, and crazy about knights and the whole medieval scene. I tried to figure out what attracted him to it so much, and began to write a book.
I have read only the first 'Harry Potter' book. I thought it excellent, perhaps the best thing written for older children since The Hobbit. I wish the books had been around when my kids were the right age for them.
I felt I needed to bring in someone from outside, who would not have heard about the Aelf and Angrborn from childhood.
I don't think anyone is more intrinsically holy. People experience God in many ways; and it seems to me that God does what the rest of us do: He chooses the means that best gets His message across.
I began with the idea of writing about a good man in a bad religion. That's all.
I began with Teutonic Myth: Valhalla above, the elves below. When I needed another layer, I added one. The lowest is not Muspel.
'Hour of Trust' was inspired by a Damon Runyon story, 'A Light in France.' It's basically an early WWII story, written when most people expected that world war to be much like the first one. I read 'A Light in France' and started playing with the idea in an SF setting.
He's not rewarding us by talking to us. He's talking to us because He has something to say to us directly, as opposed to the things He says to all humanity.
Ambiguity is necessary in some of my stories, not in all. In those, it certainly contributes to the richness of the story. I doubt that thematic closure is never attainable.
A youthful American voice isn't particularly challenging - I've been a young American, and they're all around me. I can walk from my house to Barrington High School.
You can't go home again.
What is it that makes a man willing to sit up on top of an enormous Roman candle, such as a Redstone, Atlas, Titan or Saturn rocket, and wait for someone to light the fuse?
We are now in the Me Decade - seeing the upward roll of the third great religious wave in American history.
We are always acting on what has just finished happening. It happened at least 1/30th of a second ago. We think we're in the present, but we aren't. The present we know is only a movie of the past.
To a man of sixty... one of the grimmest reminders of the Reaper's approach comes when his doctors, the people who have attended to his body for decades, begin retiring on him... or dying on him... or both.
This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.
There is no spectacle on earth more appealing than that of a beautiful woman in the act of cooking dinner for someone she loves.
There has been a time on earth when poets had been young and dead and famous - and were men. But now the poet as the tragic child of grandeur and destiny had changed. The child of genius was a woman, now, and the man was gone.
There are some people who have the quality of richness and joy in them and they communicate it to everything they touch. It is first of all a physical quality; then it is a quality of the spirit.
The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.