Algis Budrys Quotes

I—ah—have some idea."
"You argue?"
"I propose."
"Marriage?"
"No. Another form of dialectical antagonism.

You know, even more than playing chess, I dislike dealing with self-righteous chess players.

He wondered, as he often had during his life, at people’s ability to think so intricately and to still be wrong.

Any intelligent race you can hope to someday relate to is going to have to come up essentially the same developmental roads and deal with the physical laws of the Universe in about the same way.

I had had a good life. A somewhat shorter one than I had anticipated, but I had had the money, I had had the girls, and nobody told me what to do. Is there, really, anything else? Are you sure?

He saw Hawks, grunted, hefted the bottle and said, “I hate the stuff. It tastes lousy, it makes me gag, it stinks, and it burns my mouth. But they keep putting it in your hands, and they keep saying ‘Drink up!’ to each other, and ‘What’s the matter, Charlie, falling a little behind, there? Freshen up that little drinkee for you?” Until you feel like a queer of some kind, and a bore for the times you say you don’t want another one, positively. And they fill their folklore with it, until you wouldn’t dream you were having a good time unless you’d swilled enough of the stuff to poison yourself all the next day. And they talk gentleman talk about it—ages and flavors and brands and blends, as if it wasn’t all ethanol in one concentration or another. Have you ever heard two Martini drinkers in a bar, Hawks? Have you ever heard two shamans swapping magic?”

Once he’d been in his twenties, looking forward. Now he was a shade past fifty, and what he looked back on was subtly less satisfactory than what he had looked forward to.

Time was when men of Horse Watson’s profession typically never slept sober, and died with their livers eroded. It must have been fun to watch the literate swashbucklers make fools of themselves in the frontier saloons, indulging in horsewhippings and shoot-outs with rival journalists and their partisans. But who stopped to think what it was to have the power of words and publication, to discover that an entire town and territory would judge, condemn, act, reprieve and glorify because of something you had slugged together the night before? Because of something you had handset into type, smudging your fingertips with metal poisons that inexorably began their journey through your bloodstream? For the sake of the power, you turned your liver and kidneys into spongy, irascible masses; you tainted the tissue of your brain with heavy metal ions until it became a house haunted by stumbling visions. Alcohol would temporarily overcome the effect. So you became an alcoholic, and purchased sanity one day at a time, and made a spectacle of yourself. It was neither funny nor tragic in the end—it was simply a fact of life that operated more slowly on the mediocre, because the mediocre could turn themselves off and go to sleep whether they had done the night’s job to their own satisfaction or not.

There are the people in this world who act, and the people who scheme. The ones who act get things done, and the ones who scheme try to take credit for it. You must know that as well as I do.

There’re limits to what civilized people can bring out into the open, no matter how savagely they can speculate.

I'm not frightened.
"None of us are ever frightened. Now and then, we'd just like more time to plan our responses.

Look, if I could guarantee what the results were going to be, I wouldn’t need a research program!

Wasn’t being a dilettante the result of an inner conviction that you were too good for routine living?

Are our souls so much perverted?
Can we not relent?
Or are the stars the madman’s cost
For his inborn discontent?

People want to be safe, and comfortable. If safety and comfort is to be found in guns, then they will take up guns—of their own accord, in their own need. And when safety and comfort are found in libraries, then the guns rust.