10 quotes
Parallels, spirals, and reflections are some of my favorite literary patterns.
The Vorkosigan Companion (2008)
I have a catchphrase to describe my plot-generation technique — "What's the worst possible thing I can do to these people?"
The Vorkosigan Companion (2008)
From fried witchetty grubs to gold-plated turnips, when you're a writer you never know what's going to appear on your plate next. It keeps a woman alert, it does.
The Vorkosigan Companion (2008)
I am increasingly convinced that technological culture is the entire root of women's liberation.
The Vorkosigan Companion (2008)
I've always tried to write the kind of book I most loved to read: character-centered adventure.
The Vorkosigan Companion (2008)
One of the best things about writing is how it redeems, not to mention recycles, all of one's prior experiences, including — or perhaps especially — the failures.
The Vorkosigan Companion (2008)
Not all books are created equal, and for the special ones, you begin to know it sometimes even before the work is finished, but always by the time you slam that last line home and shriek, "Done! Done!," and fall head-down across your keyboard like the runner from Marathon.
The Vorkosigan Companion (2008)
I attack both from the logic-side, scribbling outline after outline, and the long-walk relaxed-visualization-side, and while neither alone is enough, the combination synergizes. Which is just a fancy way of saying, "I think about it a lot, day and night."
The Vorkosigan Companion (2008)
I have no idea why some of my books draw awards and others don't, except that the ones I spent the least time worrying about other people's response to — that I wrote for myself — seem to do the best of all.
The Vorkosigan Companion (2008)
Reading is an active and elusive experience. Every reader, reading exactly the same text, will have a slightly different reading experience depending on what s/he projects into the words s/he sees, what strings of meaning and association those words call up in his/her (always) private mind. One can never therefore, talk about the quality of a book separately from the quality of the mind that is creating it by reading it, in the only place books live, in the secret mind.
The Vorkosigan Companion (2008)