C.S. Friedman Quotes

Fiction must convince our bodies for it to have any chance of convincing our minds.

Civilized man longs for the illusion of barbarism. Either his culture fulfills this need by adopting its outer trappings, or he will be seduced by his first contact with a culture that does.

It struck me then how much the past - not just the past but history and family - was like the ocean tide. It was always the same ocean, but the waves made it fresh and new each time.

...Promises are more dangerous then secrets.

Come find me," Leo put in, his gaze full of understanding. "Whenever you want. I'll be here.

I'm looking for a balance of reported and essayistic work by up-and-coming women journalists. Often that means combing online-only sources or alt weeklies.

I don't have to work extra hard, but that's because there are a lot of women in my professional network and I have hired a lot of women as full-time writers and part-time columnists.

Writing teaches writing. Your writing will teach you how to write if you work hard enough and have enough faith.

Daily life is always extraordinary when rendered precisely.

To gain the book, one must give up all hope for the book. It is the only way the book can get written.

Fiction structures an experience for the reader to live through. ... That is why people read: to have experiences.

How we learn is what we learn.

The antidote to envy is one's own work. Always one's own work. Not the thinking about it. Not the assessing of it. But the doing of it. The answers you want can come only from the work itself.

The best thing about liver is how virtuous it makes you feel after you've eaten some.

A man does not truly understand his limitations until he has tested them.

Tomorrow could not get better if one failed to survive today.

What is a child?" he asks her. The diamond gaze does not flinch. "Creatures that are sold on the street by their parents, to get the coin to make more children." She paused. "Adults sell themselves.

In a world where data is coin of the realm, and transmissions are guarded by no better sentinels than man-made codes and corruptible devices, there is no such thing as a secret.

I don't photograph anyone if I can't meet with them first because if I don't do that, then they're just going to the dentist and they're filled with fear. They don't know who I am.

My days are kind of controlled by my projects, so sometimes they're album covers. Sometimes they're commission portrait shoots. Sometimes they are editorial, so it kind of - I don't dictate it.

I think that people have to just go with their gut and follow their passion if they're photographers.

When people warn me about someone - the label head or the publishing head - that somebody is difficult, I'm in heaven.

Giving someone their style or bumping up their sense of style to be a better version of what it is, is part of the fun of what I do, and I actually approached Al Sharpton. They didn't come to me.

I think that people get into trouble when they photograph something that they... that is not in their world. It's like when they say "write what you know."

There are certain people that you don't have to even work at extracting their inner life. It is just there and they're happy to share it with you.

I guess I'm half traditionalist, half modern girl and I just never... I love the digital world and I love electronica and after I shoot everything is digital, but I just... I don't know.

I love my cameras. I love contact sheets. I love the visceral thing of film and I'm not positive that I can replicate my lighting digitally. My assistants tell me I can, but, just stubborn I guess.

You know a photo session is really a dance and making sure that they're comfortable and for me it's the music, the music, the music. That is everything.

So sometimes it is an outright manipulation like that, but most of the time I'm just, I'm creating a mood that is a place of comfort for the person and a way for our dialogue to be more fluid.

Everyone hates their picture being taken and they're nervous and they're bringing all of that. When I meet with them they realize it is a collaboration and they look forward to coming back.

We expect to make about 500,000-600,000 more. Our initial goal was one million, but in reality we will probably make a bit less.

A research division develops marketing material for its deal makers. We have no policy position. If you have a policy position you can't possibly forecast.

If you lose yourself to rage in the complexity of battle, you are going to be lost.

The man who hates war more than he hates the Nazis is a wicked man.

Strategy is something that emerges from reality, while tactics might be chosen.

The most horrible sort of war is civil war.

When I went to war, I did not go making geopolitical calculations. I went to war with a lust.

By the 20th century, war ceased to be an encounter between two armies. It became an encounter between two societies, because a factory worker producing a gun or a bomb is as deadly as a pilot.

I cannot understand how something as ubiquitous as war can simply be dismissed as pathological. It is not clear to me that it is an unspeakable evil. If it is, I need proof of it.

We cannot anticipate the moral circumstances under which we will live. And therefore [I refuse] to say that I will not live in a moral circumstance that requires violence.

In a way, we can have a much easier discussion about the future of technology than we can about why a young man kills another man in a war.

Recent presidents have gone off on ad hoc adventures. They have set unattainable goal because they have framed the issue incorrectly, as they believed their own rhetoric.

The warrior must continue to make decisions in the face of extreme circumstances. He cannot afford to get angry or frightened.

The kind of president we need has little to do with ideology and more to do with a willingness to wield power to moral ends.

The important thing in war is that there is an element of rage, but you must remain very distant from it.

So as soon as you want something to happen you begin skewing the data to support it. Our stuff is invaluable to decision-makers precisely because we have no ax to grind.

Constraint theory defines for you what outcomes are possible and what outcomes are impossible. It also eliminates wishful thinking.

I entered the Physics Department in 1950, receiving a Master's degree in 1953 and a Ph.D. in 1956. It is difficult to convey the sense of excitement that pervaded the Department at that time.

When there were financial difficulties they still managed to provide us with music and art lessons.

Your processes are amazingly fast, yet flexible, and the people at Screaming Circuits, from finance to the factory floor, are all knowledgeable and a joy to work with.