That we are capable only of being what we are remains our unforgivable sin.

A youthful American voice isn't particularly challenging - I've been a young American, and they're all around me. I can walk from my house to Barrington High School.

You never learn how to write a novel. You just learn how to write the novel that you're writing.

I could speculate, but it would be just speculation and the kind of thing that you would get in with a science fiction story. And if I was doing a science fiction story then I would come up with what can go wrong with this system.

Hope is a psychological mechanism unaffected by external realities.

Men are said to desire women, Severian. Why do they despise the women they obtain?

All of us... when we think we are talking most intimately to someone else, are actually addressing an image we have of the person to whom we believe we speak.