Orson Scott Card
Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.Collection: Space
Unemployment is capitalism's way of getting you to plant a garden.Collection: Work
I hope I am remembered by my children as a good father.Collection: Dad
Among my most prized possessions are words that I have never spoken.
The lies we live will always be confessed in the stories that we tell.
I don't believe that there are aliens. I believe there are really different people.
I say this as a Democrat, for whom the Republican domination of government threatens many values that I hold to be important to America's role as a light among nations. But there are no values that matter to me that will not be gravely endangered if we lose this war.
There's a reason why every human society has fiction. It teaches us how to be 'good', to behave in a way that is for the benefit of the whole community.
Laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books.
One mind can think only of its own questions; it rarely surprises itself.
As long as you keep getting born, it's alright to die some times.
It's the middle class that feels the luxury of being able to have causes.
The priests say that God created our souls, and that just puts us under the control of another puppeteer. If God created our will, then he's responsible for every choice we make.
God, our genes, our environment, or some stupid programmer keying in code at an ancient terminal - there's no way free will can ever exist if we as individuals are the result of some external cause.
My favourite all-time work of fiction: Lord of the Rings. My favourite all-time nonfiction book: Guns, Germs, and Steel. Ask me again next week, you'll get a different answer.
Ulysses, obviously. It was an elaborate prank, and our supposed intellectual elite continue to fall for it.
There is more good writing and good acting in any ten minutes of Twister than in, say, all of Citizen Kane.
I listen to music constantly while writing.
I have lived in the only decades I could have lived in, and hope to live through at least a few more.
In all my study of history, I have never found a time or place I would rather have lived than now.
I am especially grateful, however, to have known the fifties, before we began to poison our own civilization - or at least before the effects of the poison began to be felt.
I buy way too many books.
My college training was primarily in theatre, with an eye to becoming a director, actor, or producer.
I fell into playwriting accidentally, took some classes in it, and also took creative writing classes, but I really didn't expect it to be a career because I didn't believe there was a way to make money as a playwright without being lucky and I didn't feel particularly lucky.
The education that prepared me was my general education classes, which I tried to avoid when I was a stupid undergraduate, but which gave me the foundation of general knowledge that makes a career as a writer possible.
The most important training, though, is to experience life as a writer, questioning everything, inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that, all the other things will come; if you don't, there's no hope for you.
But in the meantime I became accustomed to the writing life and it would be hard to change now - partly because of the salary cut if I went to my other love, teaching; and partly because I still have stories to tell, even though it isn't all that fun doing the work anymore.
Writing sessions can last an hour or sixteen hours, depending on how it's going.
Working is hard and distracts from having fun.
Of course, I also hear from critics who detest what I do, and while sometimes I feel rather proud of having made various the loathsome people or groups angry, at other times I wonder why I put up with such grief.
The best thing about my job, though, is stopping at the end of the day and rejoining the human universe.
You who speak languages, you are such liars.
Your work is first, learning is first, winning is everything because without it there is nothing.
I wonder sometimes if the motivation for writers ought to be contempt, not admiration.
In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him.
Everything important in sci-fi showed up in the magazines first. It's the proving ground for new writers and new ideas.
I realized that everything important in sci-fi showed up in the magazines first. It's the proving ground for new writers and new ideas.
The wise are not wise because they make no mistakes. They are wise because they correct their mistakes as soon as they recognize them.Collection: Wise
Just because you believe it doesn't make it so.Collection: Believe
You spend your whole life grieving for those who haven't died yet.Collection: Grieving
You know how writers are... they create themselves as they create their work. Or perhaps they create their work in order to create themselves.Collection: Art
If pigs could vote, the man with the slop bucket would be elected swineherd every time, no matter how much slaughtering he did on the side.Collection: Men
There are times when the world is rearranging itself, and at times like that, the right words can change the world.Collection: Inspirational
Good people can't out-think evil, cause evil thinks of things good folks can't think of.Collection: Thinking
We don't read novels to have an experience like life. Heck, we're living lives, complete with all the incompleteness. We turn to fiction to have an author assure us that it means something.Collection: Live Life
Madness, and then illumination.Collection: Illumination
America's intellectual community has never been very bright. Or honest. They're all sheep, following whatever the intellectual fashion of the decade happens to be. Demanding that everyone follow their dicta in lockstep. Everyone has to be open-minded and tolerant of the things they believe, but God forbid they should ever concede, even for a moment, that someone who disagrees with them might have some fingerhold of truth.Collection: Fashion
Changing the world is good for those who want their names in books. But being happy, that is for those who write their names in the lives of others, and hold the hearts of others as the treasure most dear.Collection: Book
All the stories are fictions. What matters is which fiction you believe.Collection: Believe
Because never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along―the same person that I am today.Collection: Children