Jay Lake Quotes & Sayings

I wished I'd thought of that last before I'd departed. It might have been good advice to give out in my final days in Copper Downs, had I been able to fit such a conversation in between my busy schedule of murder, arson, and funerary rites. — Jay Lake

Writing is self-reinforcing. Don't make a fetish out of it, and don't surrender to the myth of the garret, or the myth of the chained muse. It's like playing the guitar, or practicing taekwondo, or having sex. The more you do, the better you get. The better you get, the better it feels. The better it feels, the more you want to do. — Jay Lake

Ever has common decency paved the way to uncommon folly. — Jay Lake

Some people would rather that you die for their beliefs than that they re-examine those beliefs. — Jay Lake

Any cause that requires mockery and abuse to advance itself isn't one I need to engage with, regardless of my basic beliefs or agreement with the underlying goals. — Jay Lake

The fanged shadows boiled out behind them, howling for blood, their voices creaking with the sound of snapping bones. The fallen of Hethor's own party seemed to be swept up in the pursuit, dead correct people on their trail, keening, crying, blaming. Rivers of red flowed rapidly across the stone dock in the twilight, slippery sticky blood overtaking their flight to make them trip and slide headfirst into stone bollards or pitch screaming into the sea. — Jay Lake

Pregnancy, childbirth, healing and old age all required gee force. No amount of gengineering by the Biomistresses of the great stations could circumvent that inescapable evolutionary fact. — Jay Lake

Building a temple atop a minehead, when the local tulpas haunted the dangerous galleries and tunnels of Below, had not been the wisest judgment ever made. I tried to remember if this had been my idea. Somehow I had the feeling that it was. — Jay Lake

Do not teach your congregation to pray.
Someday they might succeed. — Jay Lake

We are not dead!"
He could hear the smile, even in her answering yell. "Certainly we are. It is only that our bodies have not yet learned the truth. — Jay Lake