Frank Herbert

Attributed

• "A man is a fool not to put everything he has, at any given moment, into what he is creating. You're there now doing the thing on paper. You're not killing the goose, you're just producing an egg. So I don't worry about inspiration, or anything like that. It's a matter of just sitting down and working. I have never had the problem of a writing block. I've heard about it. I've felt reluctant to write on some days, for whole weeks, or sometimes even longer. I'd much rather go fishing. for example. or go sharpen pencils, or go swimming, or what not. But, later, coming back and reading what I have produced, I am unable to detect the difference between what came easily and when I had to sit down and say, 'Well, now it's writing time and now I'll write.' There's no difference on paper between the two."

• "I think science fiction does help, and it points in very interesting directions. It points in relativistic directions. It says that we have the imagination for these other opportunities, these other choices. We tend to tie ourselves down to limited choices. We say, 'Well, the only answer is. . .' or, 'If you would just. . .' Whatever follows these two statements narrows the choices right there. It gets the vision right down close to the ground so that you don't see anything happening outside. Humans tend not to see over a long range. Now we are required, in these generations, to have a longer range view of what we inflict on the world around us. This is where, I think, science fiction is helping. I don't think that the mere writing of such a book as Brave New World or 1984 prevents those things which are portrayed in those books from happening. But I do think they alert us to that possibility and make that possibility less likely. They make us aware that we may be going in that direction. We may be contriving a strictly controlled police culture. B. F. Skinner worries the hell out of me. He is right out of Huxley. He is standing there like a small boy saying, 'Please let me have a world like this because I feel safe in it!' He is saying, 'I want to control it.' He may be very accurate in his assessment that our total society is going in that direction and that maybe he is opting for the lesser of numerous evils, in his view. But what kind of a society would that produce? "

• "The stakes in conflict do not change. Battle determines who will control the wealth or its equivalent."

• "He who can destroy a thing, can control a thing."

• "It is a wise man that does know the contented man is never poor, whilst the discontented man is never rich...."

• "Wealth is a tool of freedom, but the pursuit of wealth is the way to slavery."

• "Enemies make you stronger, allies make you weaker."

• "To suspect your own mortality is to know the beginning of terror, to learn irrefutably that you are mortal is to know the end of terror."

• "How often it is that the angry man rages denial of what his inner self is telling him."

• "When law and duty are one, united by religion, you never become fully conscious, fully aware of yourself. You are always a little less than an individual."

• "Something cannot emerge from nothing."

• "There is no escape - we pay for the violence of our ancestors."

• "There is probably no more terrible instants of enlightenment than the one in which you discover your father is a man - with human flesh."

• "The proximity of a desirable thing tempts one to overindulgence. On that path lies danger."

• "Any road followed precisely to its end leads precisely nowhere. Climb the mountain just a little bit to test it is a mountain. From the top of the mountain, you cannot see the mountain."

• "To attempt seeing Truth without knowing Falsehood. It is the attempt to see the Light without knowing the Darkness. It cannot be."

• "Kindness is the beginning of cruelty."

• "Religion often partakes of the myth of progress that shields us from the terrors of an uncertain future."