Orson Scott Card

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.

I buy way too many books.

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

My college training was primarily in theatre, with an eye to becoming a director, actor, or producer.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Writing sessions can last an hour or sixteen hours, depending on how it's going.

Working is hard and distracts from having fun.

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

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

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

You who speak languages, you are such liars.

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

Your work is first, learning is first, winning is everything because without it there is nothing.

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.

Everything important in sci-fi showed up in the magazines first. It's the proving ground for new writers and new ideas.

I realized that everything important in sci-fi showed up in the magazines first. It's the proving ground for new writers and new ideas.

I have lived in the only decades I could have lived in, and hope to live through at least a few more.

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.

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

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.

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

The priests say that God created our souls, and that just puts us under the control of another puppeteer. If God created our will, then he's responsible for every choice we make.