83 Quotes by Nancy Kress

You think intelligence and grit can succeed by themselves, but I'm telling you that's a pretty illusion.

An alien had given her his phone number and asked her to wait. It was almost like dating again.

...neither of them has yet learned to accept hard necessity without making it worse by regret. That's a vital lesson, Miri. Regret is not productive. Nor is guilt, nor grief.

The art of fiction, like the art of stage magicians, is one of directing the audience's attention to what you want them to see.

Anything said in upper-crust British automatically sounded intelligent.

Things got said, the kinds of embarrassing things that don't go away. Tempers ran high. My paternal grandfather's teak desk required a new panel, which never quite matched the others. Intellectual debate can be very hard on furniture.

Where did the bonds of maternity end? All children grew up, changed, became somebody else. Parents who trembled that they might lose a gap-toothed toddler to some terrible accident ended up losing him anyway, always, to time. The toddlers died, after all, and what was left was a bond with another adult, who had once been the beloved child.

A stereotype may be negative or positive, but even positive stereotypes present two problems: They are cliches, and they present a human being as far more simple and uniform than any human being actually is.

You must learn to be three people at once: writer, character, and reader.