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A well-aimed spear is worth three.
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I gave up the love of learning for the love of oblivion-the two cannot live together.
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Strangely, although the world is already full of fearful things, mortals seems always to hunt for new worries.
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The wisdom of our parents, grandparents, ancestors. In each individual life, it seems, we must first reject that wisdom, then later come to appreciate it.
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One of the fascinating things about researching Heaven and Hell is, of course, the fact that there are so few descriptions of Heaven, because most people can't really explain what it would be like beyond a couple of sentences, whereas Hell is quite often personal.
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As for monkeys, I would have five, and they would be named: See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil, Do Pretty Much Whatever The Hell You Want, and Expensive Attorney.
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People may get tired of hearing from me, but I don't think I'll ever run out of things that I want to write about.
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He had once thought it was strange to have a friend you'd never met. Now it was even stranger, losing a friend you'd never really had
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Sometimes doing the gods’ bidding required a hardened heart.
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My parents were perfectly open-minded about everything. They never tried to convince us of what was true or what wasn't true in their minds. We were just presented with the information that was around and pretty much allowed - though, I mean, we knew how they felt. We knew they didn't go to church. So obviously that had an effect.
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For me, any book I'm writing is also a chance to get in and research and read and learn things that I maybe only knew a little bit about before.
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Unless technology itself is drastically repressed, the idea of the dystopian monoculture like Orwell's 1984 gets harder to believe. But the danger of a solipsistic society will grow, of a disconnected society of mirror-watchers and navel-gazers.
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If you're writing fantasy or science fiction, it's really hard to do if you don't know a lot, at least in a basic way, about how the real world works.
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Every major technological step forward has profoundly changed human society - that's how we know they're major, even if we don't always realise it at the time. Farming created cities. Writing, followed eventually by printing, vastly increased the preservation and transmission of cultural information across time and space.
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Never make your home in a place. Make a home for yourself inside your own head. You'll find what you need to furnish it - memory, friends you can trust, love of learning, and other such things. That way it will go with you wherever you journey.
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Perhaps it is fortunate that most heroes who die for their people cannot come back to see what the people do with that hard-bought life and freedom.
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'Why can nothing be simple?'Geloë shifted on her stool. The wise woman’s voice was surprisingly sympathetic. 'Because nothing is simple, Prince Josua.'
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We tell lies when we are afraid... afraid of what we don't know, afraid of what others will think, afraid of what will be found out about us. But every time we tell a lie, the thing that we fear grows stronger.
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It was easy to hate if he did not think, Simon discovered.
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I've always been partial to werewolves, perhaps because there's a desperation to their plight that resonates.
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I am a sandwich man. Somewhere early in life, my epigenetic switches got flicked to 'likes sandwiches,' and that's where they still are. I suspect it's at least in part because they're easy to eat while reading.
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Fear goes where it is invited.
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Simon, there are more things you don’t know than there are things that I do know. I despair of the imbalance.
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Are these things you all say magical charms to chase me away? If so, they do not seem to be working.