The use of imaginative fiction is to deepen your understanding of your world, and your fellow men, and your own feelings, and your destiny.

Nothing is yours. It is to use. It is to share. If you will not share it, you cannot use it.

You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.

Life goes on, even if two-headed and glowing faintly in the dark.

Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else. What is the other text, the original? I have no answer. I suppose it is the source, the deep sea where ideas swim, and one catches them in nets of words and swings them shining into the boat... where in this metaphor they die and get canned and eaten in sandwiches.

If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself

I suppose the most important thing, the heaviest single factor in one's life, is whether one's born male or female. In most societies it determines one's expectations, activities, outlook, ethics, manners - almost everything. Vocabulary. Semiotic usages. Clothing. Even food. Women... women tend to eat less... It's extremely hard to separate the innate differences from the learned ones. Even where women participate equally with men in the society, they still after all do all the childbearing, and so most of the child-rearing.