Friday linkpharm, quotes and interviews edition:
- “In ‘Azkaban,’…I swear, the thing I heard the most from kids was not how great Buckbeak looked or how scary the Dementors were but how funny they thought it was when Hermione sees herself and asks, ‘Is that how my hair really looks from the back?'” — Steve Kloves* [via]
- “Usually I say something like, ‘I write stories with zombies in them.’ I figure that either the person who asked is going to be charmed by this, because, like me, they’re fond of zombie stories, or else they’ll know to steer clear. I believe in truth in advertising. If that doesn’t seem helpful, then I’ll elaborate by saying that I write ghost stories or that I’m a science fiction writer. My suspicion is that when people say things like, ‘You’re a writer! What kind of things do you write?’ they’re merely being polite. Or else you’ve startled them badly and they’re suppressing an urge to flee.” — Kelly Link
- “I’m impatient with genre as a label of quality. But if we could stop critics being ignorant, genre would be interesting.” — Ursula K. Le Guin
- “I was always exploring, even when I was only nine or 10, and my parents didn’t seem to mind me disappearing. I wanted to be an explorer but it was a very frustrating ambition because, back then, every few months another bit of the world would have been discovered so by the time I was about 16 I’d given up on the idea.” — Michael Palin
- “You’ve got to give kids really beautiful children’s books in order to turn them into revolutionaries. Because if they see these beautiful things when they’re young, when they grow up, they’ll see the real world and say, ‘Why is the world so ugly?! I remember when the world was beautiful.’ And then they’ll fight, and they’ll have a revolution. They’ll fight against all of our corruption in the world, they’ll fight to try to make the world more beautiful. That’s the job of a good children’s-book illustrator.” — Tony Millionaire [via]
- “The question is, ‘Did you get it right? Did you tell the story? Did you find the moment? Did you give them the emotion you were looking to give them?’ If you did that, it doesn’t matter if three people saw it or if everybody in the world saw it. If you know that you accomplished the thing, if you told the story, you can’t worry about how many people you’re telling it to.” — Joss Whedon
- “I’m sorry my father isn’t around for a great many reasons. One is that he would have enjoyed seeing just about everyone on both sides of the political aisle decide [Robert] Novak was low-level bottom-feeding plankton. My father used to watch Novak on CNN and say, ‘There’s nothing that matters to that man beside making sure the rich get everything they can out of the government but that the poor pay for it all.” I have yet to see any indication that my father was exaggerating.” — Mark Evanier
- “To be sure, Darwin’s theory of evolution is imperfect. However, the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent well-established scientific propositions.” — John E. Jones III (PDF) [via]
- “People who support a clandestine program of warrantless domestic spying are not ‘conservatives’ or ‘libertarians.’ Neither are people who support the creation of a worldwide archipelago of secret torture sites. Neither are people who support the usurpation of the functions of government by the executive branch; who espouse the theory that the executive branch is the final arbiter of the legality of the actions of the executive branch; and who call for the investigation or prosecution of a free press that dares to report on the executive branch’s secret programs of domestic spying and outsourced torture.” — Michael Bérubé [via]
* Kloves wrote the screenplay for Wonder Boys, which is hands down my favorite book-to-film adaptation. (Actually, I think it significantly improves upon Michael Chabon’s book.) Warning, however: the interview does contain a major spoiler for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.