Orson Scott Card
Orson Scott Card
Orson Scott Card is an American novelist, critic, public speaker, essayist and columnist. He writes in several genres but is known best for science fiction. His novel Ender's Gameand its sequel Speaker for the Deadboth won Hugo and Nebula Awards, making Card the only author to win both science fiction's top U.S. prizes in consecutive years. A feature film adaptation of Ender's Game, which Card co-produced, was released in late October 2013 in Europe and on November 1, 2013, in...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth24 August 1951
CountryUnited States of America
I'm right here. This is who I really am. I'm not pretending.
Don’t win loyalty, just obedience, and only while the lash is in the room.
If it isn't a wonderful story first, who cares how "important" it is?
One judge is coughing his life out into bloody handkerchiefs and the other is burying his wife, and you think this is how God answers your prayers?
One mind can think only of its own questions; it rarely surprises itself.
Your work is first, learning is first, winning is everything because without it there is nothing.
Surely you're not saying that God had to choose between long life and intelligence for human beings! It's there in your own Bible, Carlotta. Two trees - knowledge and life. You eat of the tree of knowledge and you will surely die. You eat of the tree of life and you remain a child in the garden forever, undying.
The Buggers have finally, finally learned that we humans value each and every individual human life... But they've learned this lesson just in time for it to be hopelessly wrong—for we humans do, when the cause is sufficient, spend our own lives. We throw ourselves onto the grenade to save our buddies in the foxhole. We rise out of the trenches and charge the entrenched enemy and die like maggots under a blowtorch. We strap bombs on our bodies and blow ourselves up in the midst of our enemies. We are, when the cause is sufficient, insane.
I always think of books as being like people. Even the dull ones are worthy of decent respect, but you don't have to seek them out and spend time with them.
I wonder sometimes if the motivation for writers ought to be contempt, not admiration.
You accomplish exactly as much as the people who serve you decide you'll accomplish and nothing more.
It was just him and me. He fought with honor. If it weren't for his honor, he and the others would have beaten me together. They might have killed me, then. His sense of honor saved my life. I didn't fight with honor . . . I fought to win.
You can't write a novel all at once, any more than you can swallow a whale in one gulp. You do have to break it up into smaller chunks. But those smaller chunks aren't good old familiar short stories. Novels aren't built out of short stories. They are built out of scenes.
The ways of love are strange and hard: The love you want is always barred; The love you have you want to change. The ways of love are hard and strange.