“I think that pretty much every form of fiction (I’d include fantasy, obviously) can actually be a real escape from places where you feel bad, and from bad places. It can be a safe place you go, like going on holiday, and it can be somewhere that, while you’ve escaped, actually teaches you things you need to know when you go back, that gives you knowledge and armour and tools to change the bad place you were in. So no, they’re not escapist. They’re escape.”
Quote collection
Thinking Quotes — page 911 of 4756
“I think there should be an Occupy Gallifrey. Because 0.000001% of the people have 99.99999% of the Time.”
“She had such unusual eyes. They made me think of the seaside, and so I called her Ocean, and could not have told you why.”
“You know, I'm normally so sanguine. But... being accused of rushing these two books out to cash in on the Newbery Medal, without access to time travel equipment or anything, just makes me want to bang my forehead gently against a tree for half an hour. Is it too much to ask people to think?”
“As for thinking time versus writing time, well, that's up to you. But - and I wish it were otherwise - books don't get written by thinking about them, they get written by writing them. And that's when you make discoveries about what you're writing. That's when you get the happy accidents.”
“My stuff gets published in some countries as fiction and in some countries as fantasy. It's just where they think it will do best in the bookshops.”
“I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.”
“Some of us claim that he was a messiah, and some think that he was just a man with very special powers. But that misses the point. Whatever he was, he changed the world.”
“I don't think you should ever insult people unintentionally: if you're doing it, you ought to mean it.”
“It's like you said the other day," said Adam. "You grow up readin' about pirates and cowboys and spacemen and stuff, and jus' when you think the world's full of amazin' things, they tell you it's really all dead whales and chopped-down forests and nucular waste hangin' about for millions of years. 'Snot worth growin' up for, if you ask my opinion.”
“You know the best thing about aeroplanes? Apart from the peanuts in little silver bags, I mean. It's looking out of the windows at the clouds and thinking maybe I could go walking in there. Maybe it's a special place where everything's okay. Sometimes I do go walking in the clouds but it's just cold and wet and empty. But when you look out of a plane it's a special world... and I like it.”
“For the record, I don't expect you to believe any of this. Not really. I'm a liar by trade, after all; albeit, I like to think, an honest liar.”
“You don’t want to ask after the health of anyone, if you’re a funeral director. They think maybe you’re scouting for business.”
“Sometimes life is hard. Things go wrong—in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all the other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do: make good art. . . . Someone on the internet thinks what you’re doing is stupid or evil or it’s all been done before: make good art. Probably things will work out somehow, eventually time will take the sting away, and it doesn’t even matter. Do what only you can do best: make good art.”
“I don't want people to say, 'Something is true because Tyson says it is true.' That's not critical thinking.”
“I don't want to go into space because of war. I think we would if it was triggered. If China said they want to put military bases on Mars, we'd be at Mars in two years. That would be quick. I don't want that to be the reason.”
“It’s short-sighted to think ads won’t one day end up wherever humans are - even the moon.”
“So not enough people in this world, I think, carry a cosmic perspective with them. It could be life-changing.”
“We still refer to sunrise, sunset. That only has meaning if you think that Earth is in the center of things, and everything is moving around us. So even though we know intellectually Earth goes around the sun, the language is still pre-Copernican, as we would call it.”
“Nature is not here to keep you alive. It has just as many ways to kill you as it does to sustain you. And if you cherry-pick this fact, you are left thinking that earth is some haven for life, but 96, 97 percent of all species that ever lived on earth are now extinct from the actions of the earth itself and an occasional asteroid to stir the pot.”