The condition of the world today is such that most writers feel they cannot truthfully be "comic" about it.
I like the shaman very much, the way he was crying.
I miss you so much your absence causes me, at times, accute pain. I don't mean sexually. I mean in connection with my writing.
The best way to keep something bad from happening is to see it ahead of time. . . and you can't see it if you refuse to face the possibility.
It is to be remembered that all art is magical in origin - music, sculpture, writing, painting - and by magical I mean intended to produce very definite results. Paintings were originally formulae to make what is painted happen. Art is not an end in itself, any more than Einstein's matter-into-energy formulae is an end in itself. Like all formulae, art was originally FUNCTIONAL, intended to make things happen, the way an atom bomb happens from Einstein's formulae.
There are no innocent bystanders.
Now Christianity sounded good at first to the naive convert. Love, peace and charity - what's wrong with that? I'll tell you what's wrong - a series of unprecedented horrors perpetrated by so-called Christians: The Inquisition, the Conquistadores, the American Indian wars, slavery, Hiroshima and the present-day Bible Belt.
If you feel helpless, go help someone.
For you to win, no one needs to lose.
Every function in the child's cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people (interpsychological) and then inside the child (intrapsychological). This applies equally to voluntary attention, to logical memory, and to the formation of concepts. All the higher functions originate as actual relationships between individuals.
I think that education today is a form of child abuse. The natural tendency of children is to solve problems, but we try to indoctrinate them with facts, which they are supposed to feed back, and then we fail them. And that's child abuse. And you should never raise children that way. You should cultivate and encourage their natural tendencies to create solutions to the problems around them.