Quotes by Norman Spinrad

“You look as if you have bitten into a turd.””

“You can't make a revolutionary omelet without breaking heads.””

“[SF] was a commercial genre born in the old adventure pulp magazinesof the first third of the twentieth century, aimed primarily atadolescent males, which, over the decades, in fits and starts,evolved into an intellectually credible, scientifically germane,transcendental literature without losing its popular base.Of what other literature in the history of the western world can this truly be said?””

“Stay a dreamer, and you'll never have your dream; get down in the nitty-gritty, and when you get your dream you see what horseshit it was in the first place.””

“It ain't power that corrupts, it's the changes you put your head through getting it.””

“Kiss me, and you'll live forever. You'll be a frog, but you'll live forever.””

“America was becoming the world's best-defended Third World country, and the best and the brightest were collaborating in the process.””

“Therefore, since I could count on no continuity of sapient will to carry me through, indeed since all that was certain was that I must suffer repeated loss of same in order to maintain my body's vitality, my only course was to accomplish with what I hoped was the greater puissance of conscious craft what I had already once barely managed to achieve by accident of fate. Which was to use these periods of conscious lucidity to engrave a mantric tropism upon the presentient levels of my mind with perpetual chanting repetition and diligent meditation, so that even when reason and conscious will had once more fled, my Bloomenkind self would, during periods of enforced floral nirvana, be programmed to follow the yellow, to follow the sun that sooner or later must rise during a cycle of such meditations into its percept sphere. "Follow the sun, follow the yellow, follow the Yellow Brick Road ...””

“Who was really the cop-out, Jack who went and got what he needed to make his dream real, molding a Jack Barron reality to the shape of his dreams, or me, shaping dreams to the size of mundane reality””

“Los Pilotos tienen un concepto muy exagerado de su propia importancia, pensó D'mahl. ¿Y en qué los convierte eso? - Tres... dos... uno... En seres humanos.””

“Jerry’s fortune cookie said: “Tension, apprehension and dissension have begun.””

“[P]ower, terrible, unprecedented power, and with it came the unavoidable choice that had faced every power-junkie since time began: to have the sheer gall to fake being something greater than a man, or cop-out on the millions who had poured a part of themselves into your image and be something less.””

“At least as coherent as the Gettysburg Address backwards in Albanian, anyway.””

“If the floating cultura contained its fair share and then some of subsidized children of fortune, wealthy sybarites, refugees from ennui, and their attendant parasitic organisms, did these not serve as a communal matrix for the merchants, artists, scientist, aesthetes, and pilgrims who travelled among the stars for higher purposes? In ancient days, the courts of monarchs served as similar distillations of the more rarefied essences of human culture; these too were gilded cages filled with self-pampered birds of paradise, but in their precincts were to be found the philosophers, artists, and mages of the age.””

“and the desperation turned her face into the kind of ugly mask you see around swimming pools in Las Vegas.””