Scott Lynch

You can’t help being young, but it’s past time that you stopped being stupid.

Enlightenment! When it comes, it comes like a brick to the head, doesn’t it?

Liquor does this? Even after you’re sober?”
“A cruel joke, isn’t it? The gods put a price tag on everything, it seems.”

Time’s a river, Locke, and we’ve always drifted farther down it than we think.

I’m sure we can communicate. I speak fluent hatchet.

In time, you’ll come to understand that a state like ours cannot afford to offer up a show of weakness for honesty’s sake; Duke Nicovante charges me with vouchsafing his security, not his conscience.

“I suspect that drink has made you impulsive.“
“Drink makes me see funny; the gods made me impulsive.“

As for history, we are living in its ruins. And as for biographies, we are living with the consequences of all the decisions ever made in them. I tend not to read them for pleasure. It‘s not unlike carefully scrutinizing the map when one has already reached the destination.

Henry Fielding

Oons, sir ! do you say that I am drunk ? I say, sir, that I am as sober as a judge.

We must eat to live and live to eat.

A lover, when he is admitted to cards, ought to be solemnly silent, and observe the motions of his mistress. He must laugh when she laughs, sigh when she sighs. In short, he should be the shadow of her mind. A lady, in the presence of her lover, should never want a looking-glass; as a beau, in the presence of his looking-glass, never wants a mistress.

Penny saved is a penny got.

Men who pay for what they eat will insist on gratifying their palates.

To speak a bold truth, I am, after much mature deliberation, inclined to suspect that the public voice hath, in all ages, done much injustice to Fortune, and hath convicted her of many facts in which she had not the least concern.

One fool at least in every married couple.

China Miéville

Art’s something you choose to make … it’s a bringing together of … of everything around you into something that makes you more human, more khepri, whatever. More of a person

The reason that I like SF and fantasy and horror is that to me it's the pulp wing of surrealism.

There’s simultaneously something rigorous and something playful in genre. It’s about the positing of something impossible and then taking that impossibility and granting it its own terms and systematicity. It’s carnivalesque in its impossibility and overturning of reality, but it’s rationalist in that it pretends it is real.

Marxism isn’t about saying you’ll get a perfect world: it’s about saying we can get a better world than this one, and it’s hard to imagine, no matter how many mistakes we make, that it could be much worse than the mass starvation, war, oppression, and exploitation we have now.

I refuse to play the wink-wink-nudge-nudge game with readers. I don’t like whimsy because it doesn’t treat the fantastic seriously, and treating the fantastic seriously is one of the best ways of celebrating dialectical human consciousness there is.

Samuel Butler

The man who lets himself be bored is even more contemptible than the bore.

Words, words, words," he writes, "are the stumbling-blocks in the way of truth. Until you think of things as they are, and not of the words that misrepresent them, you cannot think rightly. Words produce the appearance of hard and fast lines where there are none. 

Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.

The most important service rendered by the press and the magazines is that of educating people to approach printed matter with distrust.

We can see nothing face to face; our utmost seeing is but a fumbling of blind finger-ends in an overcrowded pocket.

The limits of the body seem well defined enough as definitions go, but definitions seldom go far.

Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life.

Daniel Defoe

'Tis very strange Men should be so fond of being thought wickeder than they are.

The best of men cannot suspend their fate:
The good die early, and the bad die late.

Wherever God erects a house of prayer,
The Devil always builds a chapel there;
And 'twill be found, upon examination,
The latter has the largest congregation

All men would be tyrants if they could.

He bade me observe it, and I should always find that the calamities of life were shared among the upper and lower part of mankind; but that the middle station had the fewest disasters.

One day, about noon, going towards my boat, I was exceedingly surprised with the print of a man's naked foot on the shore, which was very plain to be seen on the sand.

My man Friday.

When kings the sword of justice first lay down,
They are no kings, though they possess the crown.
Titles are shadows, crowns are empty things,
The good of subjects is the end of kings.

Theodore Dreiser

Oh, the moon is fair tonight along the Wabash,
From the fields there comes the breath of new-mown hay;
Through the sycamores the candle lights are gleaming
On the banks of the Wabash, far away.

Our civilization is still in a middle stage — scarcely beast in that it is no longer wholly guided by instinct; scarcely human, in that it is not yet wholly guided by reason.

The most futile thing in this world is to attempt exact definitions of character. All individuals are a bundle of contrarieties—none more so than the most capable.

A man, a real man, must never be an agent, a tool, or a gambler—acting for himself or for others—he must employ such. A real man—a financier—is never a tool. He used tools. He created. He led

I acknowledge the Furies. I believe in them. I have heard the disastrous beating of their wings.

Art is the stored honey of the human soul, gathered on wings of misery and travail.

Shakespeare, I come! (Last Words)

Thomas Pynchon

When Marilyn Monroe got out of the game, I wrote something like, "Southern California's special horror notwithstanding, if the world offered nothing, nowhere to support or make bearable whatever her private grief was, then it is that world, and not she, that is at fault."

Why should things be easy to understand?

Let me be unambiguous. I prefer not to be photographed.

My belief is that "recluse" is a code word generated by journalists... meaning, "doesn't like to talk to reporters."

Perhaps history this century, thought Eigenvalue, is rippled with gathers in its fabric such that if we are situated, as Stencil seemed to be, at the bottom of a fold, it's impossible to determine warp, woof, or pattern anywhere else.

He had decided long ago that no Situation had any objective reality: it only existed in the minds of those who happened to be in on it at any specific moment. 

A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.

This ascent will be betrayed to Gravity. But the Rocket engine, the deep cry of combustion that jars the soul, promises escape. The victim, in bondage to falling, rises on a promise, a prophecy, of Escape....

Zora Neale Hurston

Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me.

Gods always behave like the people who make them.

Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to "jump at de sun." We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground.

Love, I find is likesinging. Everybody can do enough to satisfy themselves, though it may not impress the neighbors as being very much.

Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose. It is a seeking that he who wishes may know the cosmic secrets of the world and they that dwell therein.

There are years that ask questions and years that answer.

Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board.

h done been in sorrow's kitchen and Ah done licked out all de pots. Ah done died in grief and been buried in de bitter waters, and Ah done rose agin from de dead lak Lazarus.

William Saroyan

In order to write all a man needs is paper and a pencil. Furthermore, when a thing has been written, it is written forever. When it is printed, nothing can stop it from being printed again and again if the thing wants to be printed again and again. I must therefore be a writer.

Genius is play, and man's capacity for achieving genius is infinite, and many may achieve genius only through play.

One day in the afternoon of the world, glum deathwill come and sit in you...

I don't like to see kids throw away their truth just because it isn't worth a dime in the open market.

The truth as always is simultaneously better and worse than what the popular myth-making has it.

Everybody has to die, but I always believed an exception would be made in my case. Now what?

The role of art is to make a world which can be inhabited.

Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough....

I see life as one life at one time, so many millions simultaneously, all over the earth.

There is no such thing as a soldier. I see death as a private event, the destruction of the universe in the brain and in the senses of one man...

The whole world and every human being in it is everybody's business.

Mickey Spillane

Nobody reads a mystery to get to the middle. They read it to get to the end. If it's a letdown, they won't buy anymore. The first page sells that book. The last page sells your next book.

Those big-shot writers ... could never dig the fact that there are more salted peanuts consumed than caviar.

There isn't a coliseum any more, but the city is a bigger bowl, and it seats more people. The razor-sharp claws aren't those of wild animals but man's can be just as sharp and twice as vicious.

They found me in the gutter. The night was the only thing I had left and not much of it at that. I heard the car stop, the doors open and shut and two voices talking. A pair of arms jerked me to my feet and held me there.
"Drunk," the cop said.

I heard the screams through the thin mist of night and kicked the car to a stop at the curb. It wasn't that screams were new to the city, but they were out of place in this part of New York that was being gutted to make room for a new skyline. There was nothing but almost totally disemboweled buildings and piles of rubble for three blocks, every scrap of value long since carted away and only the junk wanted by nobody left remaining.

I'm not an author, I'm a writer, that's all I am. Authors want their names down in history; I want to keep the smoke coming out of the chimney.

Hemingway hated me. I outsell him and he was steamed. One day he wrote a story for Bluebook berating me. So I'm going on a big TV show in Chicago and I don't get it, that's sour grapes... I mean if you can't say something nice about someone why say anything at all?