Top 20 Orson Scott Card Quotes

Ulysses, obviously. It was an elaborate prank, and our supposed intellectual elite continue to fall for it.

It’s the middle class that feels the luxury of being able to have causes.

There’s a reason why every human society has fiction. It teaches us how to be ‘good‘, to behave in a way that is for the benefit of the whole community.

I have lived in the only decades I could have lived in, and hope to live through at least a few more.

The most important training, though, is to experience life as a writer, questioning everything, inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that, all the other things will come; if you don’t, there’s no hope for you.

In all my study of history, I have never found a time or place I would rather have lived than now.

Your work is first, learning is first, winning is everything because without it there is nothing.

In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him.

Working is hard and distracts from having fun.

My favourite all-time work of fiction: Lord of the Rings. My favourite all-time nonfiction book: Guns, Germs, and Steel. Ask me again next week, you’ll get a different answer.

I listen to music constantly while writing.

There is more good writing and good acting in any ten minutes of Twister than in, say, all of Citizen Kane.

The education that prepared me was my general education classes, which I tried to avoid when I was a stupid undergraduate, but which gave me the foundation of general knowledge that makes a career as a writer possible.

Among my most prized possessions are words that I have never spoken.

I buy way too many books.

God, our genes, our environment, or some stupid programmer keying in code at an ancient terminal – there’s no way free will can ever exist if we as individuals are the result of some external cause.

I realized that everything important in sci-fi showed up in the magazines first. It’s the proving ground for new writers and new ideas.

The lies we live will always be confessed in the stories that we tell.

The priests say that God created our souls, and that just puts us under the control of another puppeteer. If God created our will, then he‘s responsible for every choice we make.

Of course, I also hear from critics who detest what I do, and while sometimes I feel rather proud of having made various the loathsome people or groups angry, at other times I wonder why I put up with such grief.