Joan D. Vinge Quotes

"Myth is, after all, the neverending story."

"Throughout the ages, stories with certain basic themes have recurred over and over, in widely disparate cultures; emerging like the goddess Venus from the sea of our unconscious."

"A story told from an entirely alien point of view would read like one long typographical error and quickly lose the interest of any human reader."

"And so The Snow Queen also became a story about the need to seek equilibrium, in our own lives, with the natural world, even within the universe at large."

"As for the historical inspirations I drew on in writing The Snow Queen, I suppose I would call them more cross-cultural inspirations, though they frequently involve past societies as well as present day ones."

"Besides, wouldn't it be wonderful if no one ever had to worry about the random cruelty of fatal illness or the woes of old age attacking them or their loved ones?"

"Beyond that, I seem to be compelled to write science fiction, rather than fantasy or mysteries or some other genre more likely to climb onto bestseller lists even though I enjoy reading a wide variety of literature, both fiction and nonfiction."

"But our society does not grant nontraditional forms of intelligence equal recognition, no matter how much it would help us get along or truly enrich our lives."

"Everything born has to die, in order to make room for the future."

"Fear of the unknown is a terrible fear."

"For every path you choose, there is another you must abandon, usually forever."

"Here was a fragment of Goddess myth that, through all its permutations, had somehow escaped being turned on its head. It was the perfect springboard for the sort of novel I wanted to write."

"Humans are upsetting a fragile balance that their own human ancestors established."

"Humans may be the only creatures on Earth who spend significant time thinking about the fact that someday their lives will end."

"I wanted to show those characters discovering it is possible to find common ground, as they make their way through a plotline that I hope is engrossing enough to keep the reader a willing participant."

"I was thinking about what I wanted to write next, after my first novel, and had decided that I wanted to write a story with a lot of strong female characters in it."

"Moon is also a naive native girl when she sets out for Carbuncle."

"Perhaps the thing that makes humans truly unique on Earth is that we are never satisfied with our situation; maybe that is what's taken us so far."

"Probably I chose immortality because mortality is a universal human obsession."

"Studying anthropology, I developed a kind of holistic view of human existence, in which the dichotomies you listed are all necessary and vital aspects of life."