...in some situations winning consist[s] of disentangling oneself.

We have treatments for disturbed persons, Nicholas. But, at least for the time being, we have no treatment for disturbing persons.

The same authorities who insist upon beginnings, middles, and ends, declare that Great Literature (by which they mean the stories they have been taught to admire) is about love and death, while mere popular fiction like this is about sex and violence. One reader's sex, alas, is another's love; and one's violence, another's death.

I was trapped in admiration for what I had once admired, as a fly in amber remains the captive of some long-vanished pine.

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

You must know the story of how the race of ancient days reached the stars, and how they bargained away all the wild half of themselves to do so, so that they no longer cared for the taste of the pale wind, no for love or lust, nor to make new songs nor to sing old ones, nor for any of the other animal things they believed they had brought with them out of the rain forests al the bottom of time--though in fact, so my uncle told me, those things brought them

All novels are fantasies. Some are more honest about it.