Paul Di Filippo Quotes

It's what the reader thinks that counts.

Words do not change their meanings so drastically in the course of centuries as, in our minds, names do in the course of a year or two.

A good book changes for you every few years because you are in a different place in your own life. That's a sign of a good novel. Not only will two different readers get something different but so will a single reader at different points in his life.

Beauty is also submitted to the taste of time.

making order out of disorder any time, anywhere, can be regarded as a sacrament.

I didn't think of the narrative as making a judgment. It didn't occur to me the reader would either, but that doesn't mean it isn't possible there would be that risk.

The more I did it-the more it owned me. It made things matter. It put a spine into my spineless life and that spine spread, into backbone, ribs, collarbone, neck held high. It was something. Don't say it wasn't.

A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work; otherwise he would have not written a novel, which is a machine for generating interpretations.

When she came to write her story, she would wonder when the books and the words started to mean not just something, but everything.

The prosperity of a book lies in the minds of readers. Public knowledge and public taste fluctuate; and there come times when works which were once capable of instructing and delighting thousands lose their power, and works, before neglected, emerge into renown.

National literature does not mean much these days; now is the age of world literature, and every one must contribute to hasten thearrival of that age.

Although himself frequently a target of guerrilla decontextualization, a major part of the meaning of Michael Jackson's life was to help balance the accumulation of horrors with something closer to love in its most empowering and healing sense.

To me, science is an expression of the human spirit, which reaches every sphere of human culture. It gives an aim and meaning to existence as well as a knowledge, understanding, love, and admiration for the world. It gives a deeper meaning to morality and another dimension to esthetics.

Culture is so incredibly important because it is the foundation for all future innovation. People with passion can change the world.

There was a time when the average reader read a novel simply for the moral he could get out of it, and however na?ve that may have been, it was a good deal less na?ve than some of the limited objectives he has now. Today novels are considered to be entirely concerned with the social or economic or psychological forces that they will by necessity exhibit, or with those details of daily life that are for the good novelist only means to some deeper end.

A novel is a machine for generating interpretations.

A story is not the same thing when it ends as it was when it began.

Just remember, loss is imaginary. Nothing ever disappears in the universe; it only changes form. If there is something that still wounds you, it's because of the meaning that you have linked to it. Maybe what you need to do is to have faith and say, 'Even though I don't know why this has happened, I am willing to trust. Someday, when the time is right, I will understand.'

Suffering is part and parcel of the human condition, but suffering can either embitter or ennoble us. It can ennoble us and become a spirituality of transformation when we find meaning in it.

The novel is dead. Long live the antinovel, built from scraps.

[T]he effects of general change [in literature] are most tellingly recorded not in alteration of the best products, but in the transformation of the most ordinary workaday books; for when potboilers adopt the new style, then the revolution is complete.

I have wanted everything as a writer and a woman, but most of all a world changed utterly by my revelations.

We moved up to Oregon when I was eight, and I think the radical absence of Jewish life here might have strangely made me feel more Jewish. It's a contextual thing I guess.

If we could solve the problem of who we are and where we are going, that it would have a huge impact on the culture and waterfall in on some of the more practical and social issues.

I never write with any kind of message, and I don't think that this book, 'Goodbye, Stranger' has a message in the capital M form of the word but I do hope it makes people ask themselves questions about what they think.