Quotes from Kage Baker

Smashing things is the violent way stupid mortal monkeys solve their problems.

He is aware that he feels a vague respect for the woman. Mendoza, at least, had never done the reasonable thing, never settled for less, but held to her one insane passion even as it had dragged her into the flames. Such a valuable quality in a pawn.

It was suitably like limbo to depress the spirits of an ordinary man, let alone one with Alec's problems.

We are time machines! The truth's been right in front of our noses since cinema was invented. Hell, since photography was invented. Hell, since writing was invented. Make an image of something, and it escapes the flow of time. That's why it's forbidden! Dickens had a grasp on it with his ghosts, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley almost got it, and Einstein came so close to the truth.

I only became aware that my eyes had filled with tears when I noticed some commotion in the treetops, far off outside the perimeter wall. I blinked and looked again. There were monkeys out there fighting, screaming and pelting one another with rotten fruit.

People like these have done more to relieve human misery than any prophet with a manifesto ever will. They number in the millions, these mortals, but they don't make it into the history books much. They don't do anything sweeping or controversial. They live their lives, contribute their bits of good work, and die quietly in their beds without recognition or reward. Usually.

Despite what you hear about the publishing industry being a fixed game that you can only get in if you know somebody, I'm here in person to tell you it ain't so. If your stuff is really any good, sooner or later some editor will take a chance on you.

England was a cold, backward, rebellious little kingdom. It's king: Henry the Eighth, remembered principally for his six wives and the chicken legs clutched in his fat fists.

The 1910 Edison film of 'Frankenstein' was itself a dead thing revived by technology.

What has 'The Patchwork Girl of Oz' got in its favor? Quite a lot, from our point of view in 2009. If you want to see how Oz's creator envisioned his own work, here it is.

In 1913, the noted German actor and director Paul Wegener was making a film in Prague when he heard the legend of Rabbi Loew, who created a golem to protect the inhabitants of the Prague ghetto from persecution.

According to Jewish legend, only the very wisest and very holiest rabbis had the power to make golems, animated servants of clay. Strictly speaking, the golem is not in the same class with Frankenstein's monster, because the golem is neither alive nor dead. He is, rather, the ancestor of all robots.

So vast is the shadow cast by the MGM production of 'The Wizard of Oz,' so indelible are its characterizations, so perfect its music, and so assured is its cinematic immortality, that most people think of it as 'The Original.' In fact, it isn't.

If you want to see what stage comedians did to get laffs a century ago, watch the 1910 'Wizard of Oz.' I hope you have a high tolerance for pratfalls.

People who like to fume about the manner in which Disney changed beloved classics are often ignorant of history, not to mention the realities of show business.

We who grew up with 'drop and cover' drills know all too well what wonders science can bring us, and we like to see the guy in the white lab coat suffer a little. Or a lot.

In 1921, Harry Houdini started his own film company called - wait for it - the Houdini Picture Corporation.

A generation before, it had been sagebrush and coyotes; a generation later, it was a burgeoning movie town. But for that brief idyllic time in 1910, Hollywood looked like the perfect place for a successful writer to settle down, build his dream house, and maybe do some gardening.

Written and directed by French showman Georges Melies, 'Le Voyage' features one of the most indelible images in cinema history: the wounded Man in the Moon bleeding like a particularly runny Brie, grimacing in pain with a space capsule protruding from his right eye.

Back when the concept of organ transplants qualified as science fiction, novelist Maurice Renard wrote a thriller called 'Les Mains d'Orlac.' Call it a bastard offspring of 'Frankenstein;' its plot revolved around the old theme of Science Giving Us Stuff We Shouldn't Have - in this particular case, restoring severed body parts.

Romantic Orientalism was fascinated by the color and excitement of a powerful culture, and nearly always approached its subject with love.

There is only so much one can do for the dead without joining them. The Caravan from Troon

God damn it, Peg! Now we've got us another vortex into a lost dimension, smack in the middle of town this time!" said the mayor in exasperation. "What are we going to do?" "Beats

Every time he asked about it, Joseph smiled wider and with increasing desperation. Nef and I gave him all sorts of helpful ideas, the best of which, as I recall, had the Man of La Mancha meeting the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future