I don’t get to just say what I want, as I work for a company and I have obligations, and so I can’t go around being disrespectful to everybody. However, with as much integrity and respect as possible, I would love any public opportunity to challenge conventional beliefs, especially ones religious in nature and especially ones that have affected my life. Someday it would be great to write a book on that kind of thing. I feel like I have something to say, and it’s not something everyone else is saying.
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Responding to an interviewer's question, "Do you then see yourself being a motivational speaker, or a speaker who gets up and challenges ideology and religion?" in The Scott Clifton Interview – The Bold and the Beautiful, as quoted by Michael Fairman, hosted on Michaelfairmansoaps.com (20 September 2010)Scott Clifton
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"Let me just stress that I'm not anti-religion. I know what it's like to be spiritual. I know what it's like to try and think of these things. Now after much deliberation in my thirty-second year of life, I feel that I am not religious. I feel secular and drawn to science. I don't believe. And I'm not saying that's good bad or indifferent. I am not better than anyone who believes. I realize the need in the human condition to feel that there is a being that does things for you and will take care and all that kind of thing. I understand it. I respect you for it. So the thing that kills me though when it comes to religion is very few religious people will refuse to allow you to have your opinion. They will boycott you, they will write a letter, they are allowed to scream from the mountain tops what they believe in. You are not allowed that same thing, you are just wrong, that's all there is to it. It's interesting that when you come from that perspective and you think about what's going on in the world geopolitically and religious-wise whether it's the Taliban fighters, the Muellas, the protestants, the Irish, the Israeli Palestinian conflict. If you are not religious you kind of see it as just insanity and I realize that their issues are not just religious based, but they are about sovereignty and things of that nature but it all goes back to the fact that these seeds were planted on these books. The books of religions which are beautiful works of fiction. They're just lovely. I mean somebody's a great writer. I-- You don't have to applaud that I'm just saying these guys are great writers these guys who wrote and added addendums to suit their fancies and made arbitrary rules these guys are great writers, but the important thing being that we keep the women in the back seat. That's the main gist of all religions because we're scared of the vagina. Somehow it all leads to fear of the vagina. I can hear the typewriters clicking as we speak. So the thing is if you see these books this way and I respect that you may not see them that way, it's like as if in this country we were fighting over Grisham novels, or we had declared the Bridges of Madison County sacred ground whereupon nobody builds. Nobody builds."
Janeane Garofalo
I think it behooves us to treat our characters' beliefs with some measure of respect, whatever he believes in.
I mean I'm an atheist myself, but I don't have to believe in Minbari to write about Minbari. I think if that person is a religious character, then you have to treat them with integrity and deal with them properly. As a result, this show is very popular with a lot of religious folks.J. Michael Straczynski
I know lots of people like Albert. I might be like him myself. He was a hopeless romantic, he lived on anticipation. He was always yearning for the next thing. He was always envisioning some wonderful life with somebody else, while grimly enduring life with the woman he was with. If I think about it, I would say that that was kind of the key to his psychology, that he had the lure of the perfect situation, the perfect person. Of course if you're Einstein, you want everything that you want your way and then you want to be left alone. So you want love, and you want affection, you want a good meal, but then you don't want any interference outside of that, so you don't want any obligations interfering with your life, with your work. Which is a difficult stance to maintain in an adult relationship; it doesn't work. Everything has to be a give and take.
Einstein always felt Paradise was just around the corner, but as soon as he got there, it started looking a little shabby and something better appeared. I've known a lot of people like Albert in my time, I have felt lots of shocks of recognition. I feel like I got to know Albert as a person in the course of this, and I have more respect for him as a physicist than I did when I started, I have more a sense of what he accomplished and how hard it really was to be Einstein than I did before. It's a great relief to be able to think of him as a real person. If he was around I'd love to buy him a beer ..... but I don't know if I'd introduce him to my sister.Dennis Overbye
"I respect the secrets and magic of nature. That's why it makes me so angry when I see these things that are happening, that every second, I hear, the size of a football field is torn down in the Amazon. I mean, that kind of stuff really bothers me. That's why I write these kinds of songs, you know. It gives some sense of awareness and awakening and hope to people. I love the Planet, I love the trees. I have this thing for trees - the colors and changing of leaves. I love it. I respect those kind of things. I really feel that nature is trying so hard to compensate for man's mismanagement of the planet. Because the planet is sick, like a fever. If we don't fix it now, it's at the point of no return. This is our last chance to fix this problem that we have, where it's like a runway train. And the times has come, This Is It. People are always saying,'They'll take care of it. The government'll--Don't worry, they'll--' 'They' who? It starts with us. It's us. Or else it'll never be done... We have four years to get it right. After that it would be irreversible. Let's take care of the planet."
Michael Jackson
What about [my] books? How do I feel about them?
I enjoyed writing all of them. But I think that if I could only choose a few, which, for example, might escape World War Three, I would choose, first, Eye in the Sky. Then The Man in the High Castle. Martian Time-Slip (published by Ballantine). Dr. Bloodmoney (a recent Ace novel). Then The Zap Gun and The Penultimate Truth, both of which I wrote at the same time. And finally another Ace book, The Simulacra.
But this list leaves out the most vital of them all: The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. I am afraid of that book; it deals with absolute evil, and I wrote it during a great crisis in my religious beliefs. I decided to write a novel dealing with absolute evil as personified in the form of a "human." When the galleys came from Doubleday I couldn't correct them because I could not bear to read the text, and this is still true.
Two other books should perhaps be on this list, both very new Doubleday novels: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and another as yet untitled [Ubik]. Do Androids has sold very well and has been eyed intently by a film company who has in fact purchased an option on it. My wife thinks it's a good book. I like it for one thing: It deals with a society in which animals are adored and rare, and a man who owns a real sheep is Somebody. . . and feels for that sheep a vast bond of love and empathy. Willis, my tomcat, strides silently over the pages of that book, being important as he is, with his long golden twitching tail. Make them understand, he says to me, that animals are really that important right now. He says this, and then eats up all the food we had been warming for our baby. Some cats are far too pushy. The next thing he'll want to do is write SF novels. I hope he does. None of them will sell.Philip Kindred - a.k.a. PKD Dick
Clifton, Scott
Cline, Patsy
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