The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination

After all, fiction writers make a reality of words. The arts of writing all begin in playing with words, wallowing in them, revelling in them, being obsessed by them, finding reality in them. Words are the mud this mudpie’s made of. Some writers are cool and masterful and never get their hands dirty, but Cordwainer Smith got muddy from the toes to

What luck for a child to meet such a soul when she is young. What luck for a country to have a Mark Twain in its heart.

T’ai chi walking

A poor reader can’t dance to the prose. But the best reader can’t make lame prose dance.

“mental representations of things not actually present,” so that we can form a judgment of what world we live in and where we might be going in it, what we can celebrate, what we must fear.

by letting Eve and Adam cast themselves out of Eden without any help at all from him, and really none from the serpent either—to put sin and salvation, love and death in our own hands, as our own, strictly human business, our responsibility—now

writers who want their story to be understood not only by their contemporary compatriots but also by people of other lands and times, may seek a way of telling it that is more universally comprehensible; and fantasy is such a way.

This spirited, intelligent, anarchic Eve reminds me of H. G. Wells’s Ann Veronica, an exemplary New Woman of 1909.

Fiction is often really much more useful than lived experience; it takes much less time, costs nothing (from the library), and comes in a manageable, orderly form. You can understand it. Experience just steamrollers over you and you begin to see what happened only years and years later, if ever. Fiction is much better than reality at providing usef