Quotes from Philip José Farmer

Imagination is like a muscle. I found out that the more I wrote, the bigger it got.

Dullard: Someone who looks up a thing in the encyclopedia, turns directly to the entry, reads it, and then closes the book.

It was the essence of life to disbelieve in death for one's self, to act as if life would continue forever. And life had to act also as if little issues were big ones. To take a realistic attitude toward life and death meant that one lapsed into unreality. Into insanity. It was ironic that the only way to keep one's sanity was to ignore that one was in an insane world or to act as if the world were sane.

The truth is that Trout, like Vonnegut and Ray Bradbury and many others, writes parables. These are set in frames which have become called, for no good reason, science fiction. A better generic term would be 'future fairy tales'. And even this is objectionable, since many science fiction stories take place in the present or the past, far and near.

This story is about love, which means that it is also about hate.

It was a shameful thing that she had nothing of which to be ashamed.

As science pushes forward, ignorance and superstition gallop around the flanks and bite science in the rear with big dark teeth.

Know a man's faith, and you knew at least half the man. Know his wife, and you knew the other half.

The fortune of the man who sits also sits

Actually, the situation was intolerable. But then it was surprising how much intolerableness a man could tolerate.

Purgatory is hell with hope.

It is no idle phrase that man was made in God's image. There is something worth saving in the worst of us, and out of this something a new man may be fashioned.

It's not what a person says but what he does that reveals his true character.

Look at those mountains. They go straight up, smooth as a politician denying he ever made a campaign promise.

The ideal was the light; the real, the shadow.

La sabiduria consiste en saber cuando evitar al perfeccion

I missed the sad things about growing old, when women no longer look at you, when wine makes you weep instead of laugh and makes your mouth sour with the taste of weakness, and every day is one day nearer death.

Invincible ignorance always upset him, even though he knew he should just laugh at it.

You had to make your choice between survival and efficiency, though in the long run survival was optimum efficiency, no matter how much time and effort it took.

On returning to Germany, he rejoined Hitler, whom he believed to be the only man who could make Germany great again.

yet the world between them was wide.

I seldom lie,' he said.

Experience was something it was difficult to avoid, though many people had managed to keep it to a minimum.

What's that got to do with it?" Sam said. "A humorist is a man whose soul is black, black, but who turns his curdles of darkness into explosions of light. But when the light dies out, the black returns.