Lois McMaster Bujold on Knowledge

"I have an aversion to closed doors anyway. You never know what’s on the other side."

"If you ever have to make a choice between learning and inspiration, boy, choose learning. It works more of the time."

"Do you know, I think you’d like politics at least on Barrayar. Maybe because it’s so similar to what we call war, elsewhere."

"It's a bizarre but wonderful feeling, to arrive dead center of a target you didn't even know you were aiming for."

"To this day she didn’t know if he taken her disgusted refusal to defend herself for a covert admission of guilt."

"Rule 1: Only overrule the tactical computer if you know something it doesn’t. Rule 2: The tac comp always knows more than you do."

"Some people would rather drown our domes in blood than learn anything from history. Or learn anything at all."

"Those who do not know their history, his thought careened, are doomed to keep stepping in it. Alas, so were those who did, it seemed."

"The joys of command — well, you know. You taught them to me. One part glory to ten parts shoveling manure."

"It’s not what you don’t know that’ll hurt you, the old saying went. It’s what you do know that isn’t so."

"One learns better than to hand one's choices to fear. With age, with every wound and scar, one learns."

"Well, good going with your captaincy. I know you worked for it, even though you pretend not to."

"You know, if you’re trying to take a roomful of people by surprise, it’s a lot easier to hit your targets if you don’t yell going through the door."

"A tactical retreat is not a bad response to a surprise assault, you know. First you survive. Then you choose your own ground. Then you counterattack."

"I know you have courage, and I know you have will. The rest is just picking yourself up and ramming into the wall again and again until it falls down."

"Knowledge might not be power, but ignorance was definitely weakness, and so was poverty."

"Devotion to duty, or pragmatic ruthlessness, which was which? He would never know, now."

"The job was interesting for a week, while he was learning it, mind-numbing after that."

"Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself."

"From fried witchetty grubs to gold-plated turnips, when you're a writer you never know what's going to appear on your plate next. It keeps a woman alert, it does."

"I don’t know whose judgement is worse, yours or the jerk’s who hired you—"

"Real expertise, the kind that means you can’t be intimidated or, or…persuaded to go along with something stupid because you think everyone in the universe knows more than you do."

"“The trouble with you, Ti,” lectured Leo kindly, “is that you lack teaching experience. If you had, you’d have faith that the most unlikely people can learn the most amazing things."

"He lived, therefore he learned."

"I’ve always thought—tests are a gift. And great tests are a great gift. To fail the test is a misfortune. But to refuse the test is to refuse the gift, and something worse, more irrevocable, than misfortune. Do you understand what I’m saying?"

"I don't take information and experience into my mind in that organized a fashion, but when I want to bring it out, somehow it's there. You write what you know because — like there's another choice? The trick is to try and know as much as possible."

"Oh yes. This was going to do well. If there was one thing Tsipis appreciated, it was a quick study. Ekaterin was one of those show once people whom Miles, in his mercenary days, had found more precious than unexpected oxygen in the emergency reserve."

"Not all books are created equal, and for the special ones, you begin to know it sometimes even before the work is finished, but always by the time you slam that last line home and shriek, "Done! Done!," and fall head-down across your keyboard like the runner from Marathon."

"Acting or reacting, we carry him in us. You can’t walk away from him any more than I can. Whether you travel toward or away, he’ll be the compass. He’ll be the glass, full of subtle colors and astigmatisms, through which all new things will be viewed. I too have a father who haunts me, and I know."

"Don't worry about that depressing old dictum "Write what you know". If you need to know something, look it up. Learn how to find out what you need to know to make it right. Be passionate, be picky, have enough self-criticism to demand of yourself your best and not sort of let it slide by. And remember that the greatest defect any piece of fiction can have is not to be finished."