Endings to be useful must be inconclusive.

A sentence has meaning in the sense that a train has a track, not that a train has a passenger.

A number of things in Dhalgren are just meant to function as mysteries. They're mysteries when the book begins, and they're mysteries when the book ends.

Science fiction isn’t just thinking about the world out there. It’s also thinking about how that world might be—a particularly important exercise for those who are oppressed, because if they’re going to change the world we live in, they—and all of us—have to be able to think about a world that works differently.

Good writing is clear. Talented writing is energetic. Good writing avoids errors. Talented writing makes things happen in the reader's mind - -vividly, forcefully.

All too often, when creative people pick out someone else's creative work as an inspiration, what they end up with is very, very far from the original.

There is no articulate resonance. The common problem, I suppose, is to have more to say than vocabulary and syntax can bear. That is why I am hunting in these desiccated streets. The smoke hides the sky's variety, stains consciousness, covers the holocaust with something safe and insubstantial. It protects from greater flame. It indicates fire, but obscures the source. This is not a useful city. Very little here approaches any eidolon of the beautiful.