Quotes by Orson Scott Card

I hope I am remembered by my children as a good father.

— Orson Scott Card

Hope

I don't believe that there are aliens. I believe there are really different people.

— Orson Scott Card

Wisdom

The education that prepared me was my general education classes, which I tried to avoid when I was a stupid undergraduate, but which gave me the foundation of general knowledge that makes a career as a writer possible.

— Orson Scott Card

Success

In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him.

— Orson Scott Card

Love

Among my most prized possessions are words that I have never spoken.

— Orson Scott Card

Wisdom

God, our genes, our environment, or some stupid programmer keying in code at an ancient terminal - there's no way free will can ever exist if we as individuals are the result of some external cause.

— Orson Scott Card

Wisdom

Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.

— Orson Scott Card

Truth

The lies we live will always be confessed in the stories that we tell.

— Orson Scott Card

Wisdom

I am especially grateful, however, to have known the fifties, before we began to poison our own civilization - or at least before the effects of the poison began to be felt.

— Orson Scott Card

Wisdom

There's a reason why every human society has fiction. It teaches us how to be 'good,' to behave in a way that is for the benefit of the whole community.

— Orson Scott Card

Life

It's the middle class that feels the luxury of being able to have causes.

— Orson Scott Card

Wisdom

Ulysses, obviously. It was an elaborate prank, and our supposed intellectual elite continue to fall for it.

— Orson Scott Card

Wisdom

I fell into playwriting accidentally, took some classes in it, and also took creative writing classes, but I really didn't expect it to be a career because I didn't believe there was a way to make money as a playwright without being lucky and I didn't feel particularly lucky.

— Orson Scott Card

Success

My favourite all-time work of fiction: Lord of the Rings. My favourite all-time nonfiction book: Guns, Germs, and Steel. Ask me again next week, you'll get a different answer.

— Orson Scott Card

Success

The most important training, though, is to experience life as a writer, questioning everything, inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that, all the other things will come; if you don't, there's no hope for you.

— Orson Scott Card

Hope

Of course, I also hear from critics who detest what I do, and while sometimes I feel rather proud of having made various the loathsome people or groups angry, at other times I wonder why I put up with such grief.

— Orson Scott Card

Wisdom

Laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books.

— Orson Scott Card

Wisdom

You who speak languages, you are such liars.

— Orson Scott Card

Wisdom

One mind can think only of its own questions; it rarely surprises itself.

— Orson Scott Card

Wisdom

Unemployment is capitalism's way of getting you to plant a garden.

— Orson Scott Card

Wisdom

The best thing about my job, though, is stopping at the end of the day and rejoining the human universe.

— Orson Scott Card

Life

I wonder sometimes if the motivation for writers ought to be contempt, not admiration.

— Orson Scott Card

Wisdom

In all my study of history, I have never found a time or place I would rather have lived than now.

— Orson Scott Card

Wisdom

But in the meantime I became accustomed to the writing life and it would be hard to change now - partly because of the salary cut if I went to my other love, teaching; and partly because I still have stories to tell, even though it isn't all that fun doing the work anymore.

— Orson Scott Card

Love