Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places

We’re supposed to be talking about world-making. The idea of making makes me think of making new. Making a new world: a different world: Middle Earth, say, or the planets of science fiction. That’s the work of the fantastic imagination. Or there’s making the world new: making the world different: a utopia or dystopia, the work of the political imag

The attempt to play complicated music on an instrument which one hasn’t even learned the fingering of is probably the commonest weakness of beginning writers.

I don’t think we’re ever going to get to utopia again by going forward, but only roundabout or sideways; because we’re in a rational dilemma, an either/or situation as perceived by the binary computer mentality, and neither the either nor the or is a place where people can live.

Fiction in particular, narration in general, may be seen not as a disguise or falsification of what is given but as an active encounter with the environment by means of posing options and alternatives, and an enlargement of present reality by connecting it to the unverifiable past and the unpredictable future.

Effective works of fantasy are distinguished by their often relentless accuracy of detail, by their exactness of imagination, by the coherence and integrity of their imagined worlds—by, precisely, their paradoxical truthfulness.

as King Yudhisthira says in the great and bitter end of the Mahabharata, “By nothing that I do can I attain a goal beyond my reach.” That king whose dog’s name is Dharma knows what he is talking about.

That our society devalues it is evidence of the barbarity, the aesthetic

This is what I don’t want: I don’t want what men have. I’m glad to let them do their work and talk their talk. But I do not want and will not have them saying or thinking or telling us that theirs is the only fit work or speech for human beings.

We tried to offer our experience to one another. Not claiming something: offering something.