I hope I am remembered by my children as a good father.
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Quotes by Orson Scott Card
Explore 25 verified and sourced quotes attributed to Orson Scott Card. Open any quote for its dedicated page, source details and related topics.
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Selected quotes by Orson Scott Card
I don't believe that there are aliens. I believe there are really different people.
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.
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.
Among my most prized possessions are words that I have never spoken.
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.
Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.
The lies we live will always be confessed in the stories that we tell.
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.
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.
It's the middle class that feels the luxury of being able to have causes.
Ulysses, obviously. It was an elaborate prank, and our supposed intellectual elite continue to fall for it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books.
You who speak languages, you are such liars.
One mind can think only of its own questions; it rarely surprises itself.
Unemployment is capitalism's way of getting you to plant a garden.
The best thing about my job, though, is stopping at the end of the day and rejoining the human universe.
I wonder sometimes if the motivation for writers ought to be contempt, not admiration.
In all my study of history, I have never found a time or place I would rather have lived than now.
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.
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