Honey, there're few childcare problems that can't be solved with duct tape.
G. B. Trudeau, Doonesbury

Gannets are slim, snow-bright, yellow-helmeted, pencil-winged, ocean lanced. Concorde elegance is undermined only by a stage-propish glass eye with too much eye shadow. The young birds go dowdily among them as if a motley rag-bag of tramps had blundered into a mannequin parade. By the third year of immaturity, the birds' plumage has achieved such a bizarre weave of the old and the transitional and the new that the effect is rather of a fashion experiment gone disastrously wrong. Still, they fly serenely enough.
Jim Crumley, Shetland - Land of the Ocean

But in truth the point of all this gardening is not vitaminization or self-sufficiency or the production of food, though these count for something. Gardening is not a rational act. What matters is the immersion of the hands in the earth, that ancient ceremony of which the Pope kissing the tarmac is merely a pallid vestigial remnant.
Margaret Atwood, Unearthing Suite

I find as I suggested that garlic is power; not in its despotic shape, but exercised with the greatest discretion
Sydney Smith, letter to Lady Holland, 1.1.1836

Genre fiction may be distinguished from other kinds of writing in being shaped by the (presumed) demands of its audience rather than by the creative will of its writers.
Thomas M. Disch, The Embarrassments of Science Fiction

To cater to an audience's taste is not to respect them, and if the audience doesn't understand that, they don't deserve respect.
Phil Ochs, quoted by Robert Shelton

When I was in school, I was fortunate enough to learn from Dr. Tom Roberts, a professor at the University of Connecticut who is also the author of An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction. I don't agree with all of his ideas, but one thing that really stuck with me was the idea he had of genre rewarding broad reading--that there's a lot of value in the conversation, as opposed to the individual works.
(Which is not to say that there are not individual works of vast literary value within the SFF canon.)
I've been noticing for a while that a fair number of the books hailed as classics within the genre are, by objective standards, not exactly heartbreaking works of shattering genius. And then there are some books that I think are heartbreaking yadda yadda, that more or less sink without a ripple. (And let me clarfiy here and say I'm not talking about me. Even a little bit. Even sideways.) And I think in some cases--perhaps many cases--the merit of those books which are, you know, pretty good, but not classics for the ages... well, maybe it's overinflated or overhyped. Or maybe what's going on is that they're being assessed not for their own literary merit, but for what they contribute to the argument.
Which allows me, as a reader, to look at those books again and find something of merit in them that I didn't before.
Which may, at last, give me a definition of genre that I'm happy with. Genre is the meta-conversation that the book attempts to engage.
Elizabeth Bear, LiveJournal post, conducted 07.3.2006

Brendan Baber: What is the difference between science fiction and fantasy?
GW: Plausibility, really. Science fiction is what you can make people believe; fantasy is what people have to suspend disbelief for. Many physicists believe that there will never be a faster-than-light drive - it's impossible. But you can make people believe in one, since they don't know much physics. And there are some physicists who believe it is possible. If you talk about somebody genetically engineering unicorns, it's probably fantasy, because people don't believe in it. But it's so close that you can almost touch it; we're almost at the point where we can make a unicorn. So it's all a matter of plausibility.
Do people think, "The future might be like this?" If so, it's science fiction. If they think, "This could never happen," that's fantasy.
Gene Wolfe, Interview, conducted 20.3.1994

Magic realism is fantasy written by people who speak Spanish.
Gene Wolfe, Interview, conducted 20.3.1994

Up to about 40 years ago, those who governed the British and told them what to think inhabited a blob-shaped mental world. It comprised the Home Counties, London south of the Park, Westminster and the Inns of Court. Now, after decades of Fulbright grants and academic exchanges, their descendants inhabit a world shaped like a dumb-bell. At one end, the Home Counties, etc., then a long, thin bit, then another blob consisting of Washington DC and some habitable bits of Manhattan and New England.

The rest of the world, outside this "civilised" dumb-bell, is dark and potty. It speaks foreign languages; it suffers rather disgustingly; nobody can spell its statesmen. Dumb-bell people feel as uneasy in Prague as in Glasgow. When they say "Europe" they mean Dorset, Tuscany and Vermont.
Neal Ascherson, The Observer 19.1.1986

The gerund is a three-wheeled vehicle which was very popular before the invention of the horse.
Paul Merton, Have I Got a Bit More News For You, broadcast 30.05.2016

She understood that in refusing Mr Dent the right to give, her father was passing a message. And the message was not quite friendly. For what can be less friendly than one person's refusal to place himself in the debt of another?
Barbara Trapido, Juggling

Settle for what you can get, but first ask for the world.
Ka'a Ort'o, Gnomic Utterances CIV
Diana Wynne Jones, The Tough Guide to Fantasyland

GNOMONS
In April, thirteen centuries ago,
Bede cast his cassocked shadow on the ground
Of Jarrow and, proceeding heel-to-toe,
Measured to where a head that could contain
The lore of Christendom had darkly lain,
And thereby, for that place and season, found
That a man's shade, at the third hour from dawn,
Stretches eleven feet upon the lawn.

This morning, with his tables in my hand,
Adapting them as near as I can gauge,
Foot after foot, on Massachusetts land,
I pace through April sunlight toward a wall
On which he knew my shadow's end would fall
Whatever other dark might plague the age,
And, warmed by the fidelity of time,
Make with his sun-ringed head a dusky rhyme.

There was an old man with a beard
Who said, "I demand to be feared.
Address me as 'God'
And love me, you sod!"
And man did just that, which is weird.

Si les triangles faisaient un Dieu, ils lui donneraient trois côtés.
Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, Lettres Persanes

Il y avait un jeune homme de Dijon
Qui n'avait pas trop de religion.
Il disait, "Ma foi!
Ils m'embêtent tous les trois -
Et le père, et le fils, et la pigeon."

God must have loved the People in Power, for he made them so very like their own image of him.
Kenneth Patchen

Le Dieu des chrétiens est un père qui fait grand cas de ses pommes, et fort peu de ses enfants.
Denis Diderot, Addition aux Pensées philosophiques XVI

"Let us have faith, Mr President, that the Lord is on our side in this great struggle."
"I am not at all concerned about that, for I know that the Lord is always on the side of the right," said Lincoln, "but it is my constant anxiety and prayer that I and this nation may be on the Lord's side."
Leonard Rossiter, The Lowest Form of Wit

Writers of the past had absinthe, whiskey, or heroin. I have Google. I go there intending to stay five minutes and next thing I know, seven hours have passed, I've written 43 words, and all I have to show for it is that I know the titles of every episode of The Nanny and the Professor.
Michael Chabon, Wired

Whenever I'm shown something, like Google Glass - I put it on, and somewhat got an idea of what it did. The first thing I did was imagining what it would look like in the display cabinet beside the cash register in a thrift shop - I try to imagine how they'll look in ten years time. It's a very good exercise for putting it in perspective. In a charity shop you'll find all the once-new technology, gathering dust as all things do. And it's not as though the stuff in the charity shop didn't radically change the world, at some point.
William Gibson, Guardian webchat, 24.11,2013

There's somebody at the door wanting you to form a government.
N. F. Simpson, A Resounding Tinkle

Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, Monty Python and the Holy Grail

"What kind of people do you imagine it must have been who felt so powerful a need to place the verb at the end of the sentence?"
"I don't know, sir."
"Imagine yourself in the House of Commons. You are listening to that eloquent ass, Sir Mark Cicero. He is just getting into his stride about the unspeakable behaviour of Mr Catiline. This villain, he tells you, nineteen virtuous matrons, more about their virtue all in the accusative so you know he's done something to them but what, for heavens sake? Robbed them? Raped them? Taken them sailing? But, aha, here's an adverb, whatever he's done he's done vilely, it looks as though we're getting somewhere, but oh, no, here's a quia and we're plunging into the villain's motives when we still don't know whether the matrons are dead or alive... You follow me? What kind of a mentality can the Romans have had to regard such a sentence-structure as a vehicle of rational discourse? Do you mean to say that this is an enigma on which you have never meditated?"
Peter Dickinson, Hindsight

In that period, for fifteen days and fifteen nights, the rhetoricians Gabundus and Terentius argued on the vocative of ego, and in the end they attacked each other, with weapons.
Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

I never met a grape I didn't want to crush.
(?) Randall Grahm, Bonny Doon newsletter, Spring 1991

Verse should be epic,
Weighty, full of Sturm und Drang.
Haiku are for wimps.
      Chaz Brenchley

Some prefer epics:
No judgement. Some like haiku;
Some noise, some silence.
      Neil Rogers

Haiku are too zen,
too posed. The sound of one hand
clapping? Solid air.
      Chaz Brenchley

Why fix a moment,
when transience is its point?
Let the small thing go.
      Chaz Brenchley

Prince Hamlet thought Uncle a traitor
For having it off with his Mater;
Revenge Dad, or not?
That's the gist of the plot.
And he did, nine soliloquies later.

... for if the grand criterion of murder be malice aforethought, what could be more malicious, more carefully thought out, than to take a man outside and hang him?
Leon Garfield, The House of Cards

I see a thousand strange sights in the streets of London
I see the clock on Bow Church burning in daytime
I see a one legged man crossing the fire on crutches
I see three negroes and a woman with white face-powder reading music at half-past three in the morning
I see an ambulance girl with her arms full of roses
I see the burnt drums of the Philharmonic
I see the green leaves of Lincolnshire carried through London on the wrecked body of an aircraft
Humphrey Jennings

And when every stone is laid artfully together, it cannot be united into a continuity, it can but be contiguous in this world; neither can every piece of the building be of one form; nay rather the perfection consists in this, that out of many moderate varieties and brotherly dissimilitudes that are not vastly disproportional, arises the goodly and the graceful symmetry that commends the whole pile and structure.
John Milton, Areopagitica

For further entertainment in the long evenings, someone had invented a game - a competition with a small prize for the winner - to see who could write the dullest headline. It had to be a genuine headline, that is to say one which was actually printed in the next morning's newspaper. I won it once with a headline which announced: Small Earthquake in Chile. Not Many Dead.
Claud Cockburn, In Time of Trouble

Nudist Welfare Man's Model Wife fell for the Chinese Hypnotist from the Co-op Bacon Factory
Headline attributed to the News of the World, quoted in the Observer 'Pendennis' column, 4.7.1982

Heritage: This is the persuasive sales word of our time, signifying anything old and agreeable which might form the basis of a day-trip.
Bookworm, Private Eye 25.11.1988

We elevate people to the status of heroes in order to let ourselves off the hook: 7quot;I'm just a mere mortal - I could never even dream of doing something like that."
Jarvis Cocker, Guardian, 10.10.2012

The earth belongs unto the Lord
And all that it contains
Except the Highland piers and lochs -
For they are all MacBraynes.

The Lowlander has inherited the hills, and the tartan is a shroud.
John Prebble, The Highland Clearances

A venerable Oxford story tells of the college which received a large private bequest. In the Senior Common Room, the Fellows were discussing how the money should best be invested. The Bursar finally said, "Well, let's invest in property. After all, property has served us well for the last thousand years." And the old Senior Fellow in the corner chirped up and said, "Yes, but you know, the last thousand years have been exceptional."
Brian Aldiss, address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, quoted in The Guardian 13.9.1984

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to buy over-priced facsimiles of it twenty years later!
Alan Moore, The First American & US Angel

It's like those fairy stories: people do work for the fairies and they pay you in fairy gold, which you work very hard for. You wake up the next morning and the gold has turned into leaves and blown away. Working in Hollywood is exactly like that except that one day you wake up and the work has turned into leaves but you still have a very decent amount of money.
Neil Gaiman in conversation 14.11.2003

If the Bible came under the control of the Home Office it would get intro trouble for publicising the Devil.
David Steel, address to the Edinburgh International Television Festival, 1985

See what allowance vice finds in the respectable and well-conditioned class.
If a pickpocket intrude into the society of gentlemen, they exert what moral force they have, and he finds himself uncomfortable, and glad to get away. But if an adventurer go through all the forms, procure himself to be elected to a post of trust, as of senator, or president, - though by the same arts as we detest in the house-thief, - the same gentlemen who agree to discountenance the private rogue, will be forward to show civilities and marks of respect to the public one: and no amount of evidence of his crimes will prevent them giving him ovations, complimentary dinners, opening their own houses to him, and priding themselves on his acquaintance. We were not deceived by the professions of the private adventurer, - the louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons; but we appeal to the sanctified preamble of the messages and proclamations of the public sinner, as the proof of sincerity. It must be that they who pay this homage have said to themselves, On the whole, we don't know about this that you call honesty; a bird in the hand is better.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life

An OBE, for those of you in places that aren't British, is the Order of the British Empire, which seems rather sweet, considering there isn't a British Empire any longer. It's like being made a lord of the manor of a village that was long ago taken by the sea.
Neil Gaiman, Journal,12.06.2005

Dave Gibbons and I were talking and trying to work out what our position was about explicitly showing horror, and Dave said, "I don't think that I really like to see bad things happen to good people." I said, "Nobody likes to see that, but that is reality. Bad things happen to good people. Bad things happen to bad people. Good things happen to bad people and good things happen to good people. That's how it is. What I don't like is to see meaningless things happen to meaningless people."
Alan Moore, interview in Comic Book Artist issue 25

I felt as if I were on an assembly line, inspecting reality with a jeweller's loupe. There's no place in a P.I.'s life for impatience, faintheartedness, or sloppiness. I understand the same qualifications apply for housewives.
Sue Grafton, 'B' is for Burglar

But housekeeping, the art of the infinite, is no game for amateurs.
Ursula LeGuin, Sur

I can only say that the only time I ever iron the sheets or make meringues is when there is an absolutely urgent deadline in the offing...
Angela Carter, quoted by Carmen Callil, The Guardian, 26.04.2008

What, Still Alive at Twenty-Two?

What, still alive at twenty-two,
A clean upstanding chap like you?
Sure, if your throat 'tis hard to slit,
Slit your girl's, and swing for it.

Like enough, you won't be glad,
When they come to hang you, lad:
But bacon's not the only thing
That's cured by hanging from a string.

So, when the spilt ink of the night
Spreads o'er the blotting pad of light,
Lads whose job is still to do
Shall whet their knives, and think of you.

Can a man with a green skin and a petulant personality find true happiness in today's status-seeking society?
The Incredible Hulk, paperback edition

Boire sans soif et faire l'amour en tout temps, madame, il n'y a que cela qui nous distingue des autres bêtes.
Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, Le Mariage de Figaro, II xxi

The secret source of humour is not joy but sorrow. There is no humour in heaven.
Mark Twain

When I was editor of the National Lampoon people continually asked "Are there things you won't make fun of?" And I'd always reply to them that that was like asking a doctor if there are diseases that are simply too disgusting to treat.
P.J. O'Rourke, The Observer 15.1.1989

When seasickness and adultery have ceased to be funny, western civilisation will have ceased to exist.
George Orwell, book review, 1936

The other, much more common inquiry is, Where do you get your ideas from?
Leaving aside the obvious, "Class A drugs, actually," or, "A wee man in Auchtermuchty," I've sometimes wondered what sort of answer people really expect to this. What class of possible reply are people anticipating, or are they completely in the dark regarding the creative process?
The answer, by the way, is startlingly simple; writers get their ideas from the same place as everybody else. When asked The Question by an individual, it's perfectly okay to look them in the eye and say, "Well, the same place as you do." This usually leads to people saying they don't have ideas.
But everyone does. Everybody has ideas. If you've ever had a sexual fantasy that wasn't a perfect copy of somebody else's - you've had an idea. If you've ever thought about what you'd do if you won the Lottery - you've had an idea. If you've ever passed some time pondering the exact form of words you would use - having just heard from your bank that the Lottery cheque has cleared - to tell your boss or colleagues how much you have enjoyed working with them over the years - you've had an idea. If you've ever read a book or watched a film and thought, But what if this had happened instead of that - you've had an idea. If you've ever been walking down the road with lurid red kebab sauce dripping onto your good shoes when you suddenly think of the stingingly witty reply you should have come out with half an hour earlier in the pub, when somebody insulted you or said something you wanted to take issue with but couldn't quite work out what it was you wanted to say at the time - then you've had an idea.
Iain Banks Raw Spirit

Asked where he got his ideas from, [Tom] Stoppard used to reply, "Harrods".
Maya Jaggi, the Guardian, 6.09.2008

There's one at every convention or comic mart or work-in or signing, always one nervous and naive young novice who, during a lull in the questions-and-answers session will raise one fluttering hand aloft and enquire, tremulously, "Where do you get your ideas from?"
And do you know what we do? We sneer. We lampoon and ridicule the snivelling little oaf before his peers, we degrade and humiliate him utterly and rend him into bloodied slivers with our implacable and caustic wit. We imply that even to have voiced such a question places him irretrievably in the same intellectual category as the common pencil-sharpener.
Then, when we've wrung every last sadistic laugh out of this pitiful little blot, we have the bailiffs take him outside and work him over. No, I know it isn't nice. But all the same, it's something that we have to do.
The reason why we have to do it is pretty straight forward. Firstly, in the dismal and confused sludge of opinion and half-truth that make up all artistic theory and criticism, it is the only question worth asking.
Secondly, we don't know the answer and we're scared that somebody will find out.
Alan Moore, on the origins of V for Vendetta

Oh, I never look under the hood.
E. B. White

There are lots of clever answers to the question of, "How do you get your ideas?" and the one I favor is, "I did a lot of drugs in college," which doesn't answer the question at all, but people generally seem satisfied with it. It's the sort of thing you expect an artist to say.
The truth, alas, is boring. As Neil Gaiman said, "I make stuff up. Out of my head." Nobody wants to hear that, but there you are.
Ursula Vernon, Wombat Droppings, EMG-Zine, January 2006

On television I watched old Russian Communists, their chests aglow with hard-earned medals, ask each other when the Stalinist rot began. "About 1936, I think," said one old boy and I sobbed myself flat on the carpet at the hopeless yearning people have to believe and the whole body politic already gangrenous the year I was born.
Jill Tweedie The Guardian 11.6.1990

Woody Guthrie was my last idol
he was the last idol
because he was the first idol
I'd ever met
that taught me
fact t face
that men are men
shatterin even himself
as an idol
an that men have reasons
for what they do
and what they say
you ask "how does it feel t be an idol"
it'd be silly of me t answer, wouldn't it...

Nous imaginons plus sortablement un artisan sur sa garderobe ou sur sa femme qu'un grand Président, venerable par son maintien et suffisance.
Michel de Montaigne, Essais III 2: Du Repentir

They were served a meal charmingly laid out in dolls' house portions - and indeed it turned out to be made of painted plaster.
Penelope Lively, The Dream Merchant

I devoutly believe that words ought to be weapons. That is why I got into this business in the first place. I don't seek the title of "inoffensive", which I think is one of the nastiest things that could be said about an individual writer.
Christopher Hitchens, Scotland on Sunday, 6.07.2003

Inspiration is for amateurs - I’ve got a living to make!
John Cooper Clark, Guardian, 20.03.2023

To the man in the street, who, I'm sorry to say
Is a keen observer of life,
The word intellectual suggests right away
A man who's untrue to his wife.

Nobody who has not spent a whole sunny afternoon under his bed rereading a pile of comics left over from the previous holidays has any real idea of the meaning of intellectual freedom.
Peter Dickinson, talk given to the Exeter Conference on Children's Literature, 1970, expanded in A Defence of Rubbish

And of course irony is the great escape clause for those who wallow in prejudice.
Jeremy Hardy, The Guardian 2.11.1996

The press stands accused of holding the Israelis to higher moral standards than it holds the other peoples of the Middle East. That's not our fault. Moses started that. Are the Israelis treating the Palestinians any worse that the Palestinians would treat the Israelis if the sandal were on the other foot? Of course not. The Munich massacre and hundreds of killings, bombings, highjackings, rocket attacks and other mad-hat actions prove it. Unfortunately, morality is not a matter of double entry book-keeping.
P.J. O'Rourke, Holidays in Hell

When one small child is killed, you lose the war. Explanations are not important.
Shimon Peres, The Guardian 17.10.2000