Quotes by Connie Willis

“It is my belief that everything you need to know about the world can be learned in a church choir.”

“1. Optimize potential. 2. Facilitate empowerment. 3. Implement visioning. 4. Strategize priorities. 5. Augment core structures.”

“Fred Astaire is my hero. I love him because he was willing to kill himself to make his art look effortless. And because he proved its possible to be an artist and a good person.”

“Writers are too neurotic to ever be happy.”

“I have never written anything in one draft, not even a grocery list, although I have heard from friends that this is actually possible.”

“My latest comedy, Bellwether, let me go after everything that bugs me: meetings, Barbie, trendy coffeehouses, those incompetent clerks who refuse to get off the phone to talk to you, and bread pudding.”

“I hate sequels. Theyre never as good as the first book.”

“I watched the entire O.J. Simpson trial, and he was guilty.”

“I have watched All My Children since it started. Can you believe Erica was the one who ran over Maria and Kelsey?”

“I am a Colorado native, and, no, I did not vote for the anti-gay amendment or the same-sex marriage ban, and I am not a member of a militia.”

Thats what literature is. Its the people who went before us, tapping out messages from the past, from beyond the grave, trying to tell us about life and death! Listen to them!

When youre a writer, the question people always ask you is, Where do you get your ideas? Writers hate this question. Its like asking Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, Where do you get your leeches? You dont get ideas. Ideas get you.

And every place and time an author writes about is imaginary, from Oz to Raymond Chandlers L.A. to Dickenss London.

Actually, writers have no business writing about their own works. They either wax conceited, saying things like: My brilliance is possibly most apparent in my dazzling short story, The Cookiepants Hypotenuse. Or else they get unbearably cutesy: My cat Ootsywootums has given me all my best ideas, hasnt oo, squeezums?

Come here, cat. You wouldn’t want to destroy the space-time continuum, would you? Meow. Meow.

Dont they know science doesnt work like that? You cant just order scientific breakthroughs. They happen when you are looking at something youve been working on for years and suddenly see a connection you never noticed before, or when youre looking for something else altogether. Sometimes they even happen by accident. Dont they know you cant get a scientific breakthrough just because you want one?

Eureka!s like the one Archimedes had when he stepped in a bathtub and suddenly realized the answer to the problem of testing metals density are few and far between, and mostly its just trying and failing and trying something else, feeding in data and eliminating variables and staring at the results, trying to figure out where you went wrong.

I was on a walking tour of Oxford colleges once with a group of bored and unimpressable tourists. They yawned at Balliols quad, T.E. Lawrences and Churchills portraits, and the blackboard Einstein wrote his E=mc2 on. Then the tour guide said, And this is the Bridge of Sighs, where Lord Peter proposed (in Latin) to Harriet, and everyone suddenly came to life and began snapping pictures. Such is the power of books.

Why do only the awful things become fads? I thought. Eye-rolling and Barbie and bread pudding. Why never chocolate cheesecake or thinking for yourself?

Whats Management up to? I whispered to Bennett.My guess is a new acronym, he whispered. Departmental Unification Management Business. He wrote down the ltters on his legal pad. D.U.M.B.