Christopher Priest Quotes

#1. To aspire to life forever would be to acquire living at the expense of life.

Christopher Priest

#2. Living is not an art, but to write of life is. Life is a series of accidents and anticlimaxes, misremembered and misunderstood, with lessons only dimly learned. Life is disorganized, lacks shape, lacks story.

Christopher Priest

#3. In the expression of grief lies recovery from grief itself. Nor

Christopher Priest

#4. None of it is real, though, because reality lies in a different, more evanescent realm. These are only the names of some of the places in the archipelago of dreams. The true reality is the one you perceive around you, or that which you are fortunate enough to imagine for yourself.

Christopher Priest

#5. A good idea is a good idea and my work should compete on its own merits, not based on the size of my fan base.

Christopher Priest

#6. Do you think it could be that those in charge of the guilds keep the system in operation after it has outlived its original purpose? It seems to me that the system works by suppression of knowledge. I don't see what that achieves. It has made me very discontented, and I'm sure I'm not alone.

Christopher Priest

#7. ...an incomplete listing of anything reveals that a selection has been made, and any act of selection is of course political.

Christopher Priest

#8. The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you're looking for the secret ... but you wont find it, because of course you're not really looking. You don't really want to know. You want to be fooled.

Christopher Priest

#9. The dream-state of the Archipelago, which is what we islanders most respond to, and least wish to see changed, seems likely to continue without interference for a long time to come.

Christopher Priest

#10. There was a duplication of myself involved, perhaps even a triplication.
There was I who was writing. There was I whom I could remember. And there was I of whom I wrote, the protagonist of the story.

Christopher Priest

#11. Magicians protect their secrets not because the secrets are large and important, but because they are so small and trivial. The wonderful effects created on stage are often the result of a secret so absurd that the magician would be embarrassed to admit that that was how it was done.

Christopher Priest

#12. The fear of dying is not just the terror of pain, the humiliation of the loss of faculties, the fall into the abyss . . . but the primeval fear that afterwards one might remember it. The

Christopher Priest

#13. I had imagined myself into existence. I wrote because of an inner need,and that need was to create a clearer vision of myself, and in writing I became what I wrote.

Christopher Priest

#14. Less welcome to the people of Paneron is the STIFLER, a humid wind that brings the allergenic pollen of carp-weed bushes from nearby unpopulated islands.

Christopher Priest