Connie Willis Quotes

Fred Astaire is my hero. I love him because he was willing to kill himself to make his art look effortless. And because he proved it's possible to be an artist and a good person.

I learned everything I know about plot from Dame Agatha (Christie).

I have never written anything in one draft, not even a grocery list, although I have heard from friends that this is actually possible.

And every place and time an author writes about is imaginary, from Oz to Raymond Chandler's L.A. to Dickens's London.

It is my belief that everything you need to know about the world can be learned in a church choir.

Why do only the awful things become fads? I thought. Eye-rolling and Barbie and bread pudding. Why never chocolate cheesecake or thinking for yourself?

To do something for someone or something you loved-England or Shakespeare or a dog or the Hodbins or history-wasn't a sacrifice at all. Even if it cost you your freedom, your life, your youth.

Science fiction is an amazing literature: plot elements that you would think would be completely worn out by now keep changing into surprising new forms.

I have great faith in the future of books - no matter what form they may take - and of science fiction.

Writers are too neurotic to ever be happy.

Cats, as you know, are quite impervious to threats.

Perhaps that's how I should think of them, Polly thought, the troupe and Miss Snelgrove and Trot. And Sir Godfrey. Not as lost to her, but as removed to this moment in time for safekeeping.

You shouldn't be looking for the secret to making people follow fads, you should be looking for the secret to making them think for themselves. Because that's what science is all about.

That's what the movies do. They don't entertain us, they don't send the message: 'We care.' They give us lines to say, they assign us parts: John Wayne, Theda Bara, Shirley Temple, take your pick.

It was about a girl who helps an ugly old woman who turns out to be a good fairy in disguise. Inner values versus shallow appearances.

One of the nastier trends in library management in recent years is the notion that libraries should be 'responsive to their patrons'.

Everyone else had the look of tired patience people always got when listening to a sermon, no matter what the century.

I hate sequels. They're never as good as the first book.

I watched the entire O.J. Simpson trial, and he was guilty.

There are some things worth giving up anything for, even your freedom, and getting rid of your period is definitely one of them.

No," I said finally. "Slowness in Answering," she said into the handheld. "When's the last time you slept?" "1940" I said promptly, which is the problem with Quickness in Answering.

And kissed her for a hundred and sixty-nine years.

The reason Victorian society was so restricted and repressed was that it was impossible to move without knocking something over.

It is not an easy thing to put on a wet sock.

If King Harold had had swans on his side, England would still be Saxon.

People will buy anything at jumble sales,' I said. 'At the Evacuated Children Charity Fair a woman bought a tree branch that had fallen on the table.

Barbie's one of those fads whose popularity makes you lose all faith in the human race.

There are moments when rather than reforming the human race I'd like to abandon it altogether and go become, say, one of Dr. O'Reilly's macaques, which have to have more sense.

One has not lived until one has carried a sixty-pound dog down a sweeping flight of stairs at half-past V in the morning.

Come here, cat. You wouldn’t want to destroy the space-time continuum, would you? Meow. Meow.

What's Management up to?" I whispered to Bennett."My guess is a new acronym, " he whispered. "Departmental Unification Management Business." He wrote down the ltters on his legal pad. "D.U.M.B.

It is the end of the world. Surely you could be allowed a few carnal thoughts.

That's what literature is. It's the people who went before us, tapping out messages from the past, from beyond the grave, trying to tell us about life and death! Listen to them!

To do something for someone or something you loved- England or Shakespeare or a dog or the Hodbins or history- wasn't a sacrifice at all. Even if it cost you your freedom, your life, your youth.

Management is proving beyond a shadow of a doubt they don't have enough to do, " she murmured back. "So they've invented a new acronym.

It was the Communists, it was the Mexicans, it was the government. And the only people who acknowledged their guilt weren't guilty at all.