Favorite quotes

Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried. ”And what are you reading, Miss — -?” ”Oh! it is only a novel!” replies the young lady; while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. ”It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda ”; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humor, are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.

When I heard the word ‘’stream” uttered with such a revolting primness, what I think of is urine and not the contemporary novel. And besides, it isn’t new, it is far from the dernier cri. Shakespeare used it continually, much too much in my opinion, and there’s Tristam Shandy, not to mention the Agamemnon.

For if the proper study of mankind is man, it is evidently more sensible to occupy yourself with the coherent, substantial and significant creatures of fiction than with the irrational and shadowy figures of real life.

I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled ”Science Fiction” and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.

The traditional novel form continues to enlarge our experience in those very areas where the wide-angle lens and the Cinema screen tend to narrow it.

No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing.

Our interest’s on the dangerous edge of things. The honest thief, the tender murderer, the superstitious atheist.

In sci-fi convention, life-forms that hadn’t developed space travel were mere prehistory — horse-shoe crabs of the cosmic scene — and something of the humiliation of being stuck on a provincial planet in a galactic backwater has stayed with me ever since.

The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.

Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can’t talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful.