Pathetic tissues of lies.
The night after watching the Apollo 11 moon landing, I snuck out of the house to look at the fat crescent of the moon high in the sky and thought, ‘There are people up there!’
I didn’t know it then but—at the age of five—I had just lost my religion.
She was younger than he and not a beauty. Too much care had tarnished her features. Under the long coat, he knew, was a slender attractive figure. It was that, he could now confess that had first drawn his attention. But it was her spirit that had ensnared him. She compelled in a way a mere beauty could never have.
Keep your god. I’ll take this.
The psyches of nonhuman species are going to be different from ours. Sketching out the parameters of an alien mind is essential to writing believable characters.
We don’t have cures for mass delusions and some of the deluded have access to apocalyptic weaponry.
Imagination is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow. – William Blake
A close look at the stories that work will show that it is the characters themselves who change, not just their situation. That is what the reader is hoping for.
At its simplest, a good story concerns a character who is unhappy at the beginning and happy (or happier, at least) at the end.
Graham Hancock seems to think that modernity will lead to the death of the human soul.
The view that humanity is violent and evil is nothing more than a relic of religion.
Shame and sex do not belong in the same conversation, let alone the same act. The sexual act, with its symphonic variety, is not merely healthy, it is glorious.