John Varley Quotes

You've got to watch yourself when you get as old as I am. You have to try new things, sometimes for no better reason than that they’re new. Otherwise you rust.

Religion and science don’t mix well, as science likes to observe and draw conclusions—to learn, in other words—and religion cares only about learning the Bible, the Torah, the Koran, etc. They don’t need to learn about this world, because they already know. A good way to describe a wasted life, as far as I’m concerned. Religious people already know things, with no more proof than some words in an old book. In short, they’re crazy.

Why is it that once having decided what I must do, I'm afraid to reexamine my decision? Maybe because the original decision cost me so much that I didn’t want to go through it again.

She was already putting her distance between herself and this woman she would kill. She was becoming an object, something she was going to do something unpleasant to; not a person with a right to live.

I am vehemently anti-religion. That is, organized religion. I despise them all. I try to despise them equally, but lately Islam has shot to the top of my hate list, for obvious reasons. I don’t give a shit what they do in their own squalid little dictatorships, but they seem to want to export “Submission” to the whole world, and they are willing to kill the likes of Salman Rushdie and those Danish cartoonists for insulting Islam. They are basically living somewhere around the 8th Century, and I often wish I had a time machine to send them back there. (Yes, I know there are moderates. So why don’t they do something about the zealots?) So when I mention religion at all in my stories, the practitioners are usually doing something nutty. About as nutty as praying five times a day facing Mecca, saying a rosary, handling deadly snakes, or speaking in tongues.

I had kept a straight face under worse provocation, so I trust I did well enough then.

There was something at the core of the world of business that refused to adjust to children in the board room, while appearing to make every effort to accommodate the working mother.

If only she could convince them, perhaps she could convince herself.

Semantic content zero, nonsense quotient high.

Just because Beethoven doesn’t sound like currently popular art doesn’t mean his music is worthless.

It’s unpleasant to find that what you had thought of as moral scruples suddenly seem not quite so important in the face of a stack of money.

I thought his lack of curiosity must be monumental, but I was wrong. It turned out that he had some queer notions about the morality of the whole process, ideas he had gotten from some weirdly aberrant religion in his childhood. I had heard of the cult, as you can hardly avoid it if you know any history. It had said little about ethics, being more interested in arbitrary regulations.

They understood the basic principles of morals: that nothing is moral always, and anything is moral under the right circumstances.

She looked at me askance. “Of course I bribed him, Victor. You’d be amazed to know how cheaply. Does that bother you?”
“Yes,” I admitted. “I don’t like bribery.”
“I’m indifferent to it. It happens, like gravity. It may not be admirable, but it gets things done.”

I didn't become rich, but I was usually comfortable. That is a social disease, the symptom of which is the ability to ignore it while your society develops weeping pustules and has its brains eaten out by radioactive maggots.