Norman Spinrad

“The world has become more complex as technology and easy travel mixes cultures without homogenizing them.”

“Is anything accidental?”

“Who was really the cop-out, Jack who went and got what he needed to make his dream real, molding a Jack Barron reality to the shape of his dreams, or me, shaping dreams to the size of mundane reality”

“I write in American slang.”

“In America, if you don't do a 100 million dollars, you've done nothing.”

“I must admit to being greatly influenced by Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces.”

“As a child, I read science fiction, but from the very beginnings of my reading for pleasure, I read a lot of non-fictional history, particularly historical biography.”

“When you're in the States and you're a writer and you've got money and you walk into a bank, you're a bum with money.”

“English is taking over the world. I just wrote a piece about it. And it's not by design. The United States dominates because it's the biggest market.”

“Mexico was conquered more by manipulation of myth and archetype.”

“I'm not gifted, but I'm not hopeless.”

“[P]ower, terrible, unprecedented power, and with it came the unavoidable choice that had faced every power-junkie since time began: to have the sheer gall to fake being something greater than a man, or cop-out on the millions who had poured a part of themselves into your image and be something less.”

“The thematic, psychological, and cultural concerns of a writer are more relevant than whatever literary mode he or she chooses to deal with in any given novel.”

“It's trite to say that the world has gotten smaller in the age of globalization, but my travels have told me that it's wrong to think this means there is some kind of uniform world culture.”

“If I had parallel lives to pursue, I would also want one as a painter.”

“I was a precocious reader.”

“It ain't power that corrupts, it's the changes you put your head through getting it.”

“I believe that interest in heroes is universal and eternal.”

“There are certain things that ordinary people have that celebrities don't have.”

“I've always been interested in the relationship between total external surround, culture, the political matrix, technology, etc., and the internal human consciousness.”