I don't believe people let things slide away. It's the nature of the universe that everything dissolves into oblivion and by every route possible, but human beings invest a lot of cleverness trying to cling to past events, real or imagined. And because we can't succeed, we get angry and frustrated and feel guilty. Except the Buddhists.

Robert Reed

Categorized in : Believe Real Buddhist

How could anyone survive even a single day, if he didn't feel as if he was, in some little great way, needed?

Robert Reed

needed littles way

I'm astonished how little fright I have of my own imagination. It really does baffle me that I don't get more scared because I'm capable of thinking up things that are so awful. On any given day I can imagine the worst.

Robert Reed

awful imagination thinking

For honest insight into who you are, don't ask yourself what your priorities are for next week. Ask what your priorities were last week.

Robert Reed

priorities entrepreneur next-week

This is a slow business to have success in. There are exceptions, but for the most part it's kind of like the last writer standing.... I've got gray. I've got plenty of gray. I'm creating a career slowly, like a coral reef.

Robert Reed

coral-reefs creating careers

I would like to say that I have software that allows me to model worlds to a high degree of scientific plausibility. I'd also like to be six foot two and fifteen years into my reign as Emperor of Europa. The simple truth is that past the character's name and a long history of making my own body cover distances, I did very little in the way of targeted research.

Robert Reed

distance character past

The burden of intelligence: you can always imagine all those wonderful places where you can never belong.

Robert Reed

burden imagine wonderful

Science fiction is really a rather tiny business compared with its giant cousin, which is fantasy.

Robert Reed

cousin giants fiction

I'm the only member of SFWA in Nebraska, but I don't pine away for the companionship of other science fiction writers. I [go] to very few conventions. I'm quite willing to be that eccentric who has a very odd job, quite happy to be the only science fiction writer in town.

Robert Reed

nebraska jobs fiction

I live for those rare and delicious moments when the words on the page take off and I am the bystander, watching as the tale shows me what will happen next.

Robert Reed

bystanders next pages

In a novella, a whole lot of crap can happen, and you can build momentum and suspense and leave room for a surprise or three. Stories are cut down to the most essential elements, and novels (this might be an unfair generalization on my part) are big fat clumsy efforts where the reader can snooze for a couple chapters and miss nothing of consequence. Hence my love for the middle way.

Robert Reed

effort cutting couple

A community is a small group working together. Community scales by adding groups, and building connections between them, not enlarging them.

Robert Reed

entrepreneur community working-together

I wrote when I was a young teen, but I didn't put an eye on the available markets until I was seventeen. The next ten years felt like a self-centered experiment in personal abuse.

Robert Reed

eye self years

2001: A Space Odyssey was a wonderful conundrum when I was a boy, with its giant concepts thrown across the giant screen at Indian Hills Theater. That movie woke me up in ways that I hadn't imagined, and I went searching for book versions of the same drug.

Robert Reed

space boys book

I've always thought of science fiction as being, at some level, a 19th-century business.

Robert Reed

century levels fiction

Before I was reading science fiction, I read Hemingway. Farewell to Arms was my first adult novel that said not everything ends well. It was one of those times where reading has meant a great deal to me, in terms of my development - an insight came from that book.

Robert Reed

farewell reading book

It has often been said that [...] the Japanese [are] geniuses at taking foreign ideas and adding a unique finishing touch.

Robert Reed

finishing unique ideas

To improve as a player you need to not only know how you plan to win, but ... how might your opponent disrupt your plan.

Robert Reed

opponents player winning

A favorite science fiction writer of mine is William Faulkner! It was an idea that came to me once, years ago, and I've never quite been able to shake it. This is facetious, on one level at least. There are telepaths in As I Lay Dying. But I think the most compelling thing for me is there are moments with him where I just feel these are not humans talking to each other. These are some hyper-intelligent, yet-to-be-born organisms. The way they look at the past without having any loss of knowledge everything that ever happened is still here.

Robert Reed

intelligent loss thinking

Occasionally, I'll dream I'm in the factory. That will help me write. Not creatively, but more like a prod. I don't want to go back there.

Robert Reed

dream want writing

A brilliant mind was never as clever as three average minds sniffing after something of interest.

Robert Reed

clever mind average