Christopher Frewin

Science Fiction & Fantasy Writer

Quotations

Selections from my own work and the works of other writers.

  1. Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man’s mind.

    Paul Atreides, quoting the Orange Catholic Bible, Dune, Frank Herbert

  2. One book at a time
    One scene at a time
    One word at a time

    Christopher Frewin

  3. It was a merry night and he was joyful to be there in the warmth and merriment, keeping festival with his companions.

    Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea

  4. Somewhere above the trees, a full moon sailed.

    Fitz, Assassin’s Quest, Robin Hobb, p. 658

  5. Regal glared at me, but I dared not move.

    “What will you make of him?”

    Regal looked perplexed. “Him? It’s the Fitz. Chivalry’s bastard. Sneaking and thieving as always.”

    “Fool.” King Shrewd smiled, but his eyes remained flinty. The Fool, thinking himself addressed, smiled sweetly. “Are your ears stopped with wax? Do you hear nothing I say? I asked you, not ‘what do you make of him?’ but ‘what will you make of him?’”

    Fitz, Assassin’s Apprentice, Robin Hobb

  6. “Without all the drugs you can really feel it. Time escaping you.”

    The Woman in Cabin 10 (film)

  7. “A living is not a life.”

    Burrich, Assassin’s Quest, Robin Hobb

  8. He looked at me. His mouth moved. He called the wind. A leaf in lightning, I shook. And the thunderclap was black.

    Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

  9. Mary Karr: “Don, I think I’m writing a bad book.”

    Don DeLillo: “Well, who doesn’t?”

    Mary Karr, recounting a conversation with Don DeLillo on The Tim Ferriss Show, episode 479

  10. Causation is divine as well as human.

    James Wood, How Fiction Works

  11. It starts with this: put your desk in the corner … Life isn’t a support-system for art. It’s the other way around.

    Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

  12. Red sank to ashes in the west, and ash-gray sank to black.

    Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea

  13. It had no hinges. No handle. No window or sliding panel.

    Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

  14. Great shafts of sunlight shone down on soil that had been shaded since before I was born.

    Fitz, Assassin’s Quest, Robin Hobb, p. 820

  15. There is a dead spot in the night, that coldest, blackest time when the world has forgotten evening and dawn is not yet a promise.

    Fitz, Assassin’s Quest, Robin Hobb

  16. …and on a grassplot a fountain played under young trees in the sunlight.

    Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea

  17. Writing can be simultaneously the best job in the world and the worst: on one end of the spectrum you have the writer whose work is read and enjoyed by innumerable people; on the other is the writer whose work—after months or even years of painstaking craft—remains unpublished.

    Christopher Frewin

  18. That’s the thing about crying yourself to sleep. When you wake up, the problems are still there.

    Jazz, Artemis, Andy Weir, p. 150

  19. “Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”

    Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, Dune, Frank Herbert

  20. He could not exist a split man, his psyche constantly erasing and re-erasing the truth.

    R. F. Kuang, Babel

  21. He could dwell on nothing.

    R. F. Kuang, Babel

  22. But Kettricken, I knew, served truth before politics.

    Fitz, Royal Assassin, Robin Hobb

  23. The food lay in my stomach like so much gravel.

    Fitz, Royal Assassin, Robin Hobb

  24. Fear feels remarkably like fear, regardless of the source.

    Fitz, Royal Assassin, Robin Hobb

  25. Listening, reading, and seeing the arts will help you in your other arts.

    Christopher Frewin

  26. Suspicion is easy to prevent, far harder to dispel.

    Vis, The Will of the Many, James Islington

  27. “Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light?”

    Ogion, A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin

  28. “Riddles, dear Fitzy-fitz, are supposed to make folk think. To find new truths in old saws.”

    The Fool, Royal Assassin, Robin Hobb

  29. Sometimes you have to go on when you don’t feel like it, and sometimes you’re doing good work when it feels like all you’re managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position.

    Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

  30. There can be no love without honesty.

    Vis, The Will of the Many, James Islington

  31. “What’s in the box?”

    “Pain.”

    Paul Atreides and Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, Dune, Frank Herbert

  32. Plot is reading; form is literary criticism.

    James Wood, How Fiction Works

  33. A scar is never the same as good flesh, but it stops the bleeding.

    Fitz, Assassin’s Quest, Robin Hobb

  34. I understood that the stables were Burrich’s treasure and home. He had come back to find both looted.

    Fitz, Royal Assassin, Robin Hobb

  35. The bakery shop of English is rich beyond belief.

    Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering the Craft

  36. “When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story,” he said. “When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.”

    John Gould, as quoted by Stephen King in On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft