The Martian Child Quotes

“know a lot of people who hide out in fantasy because reality is too hard to cope with [...] Fantasy isn't about escape; it's a survival mechanism. It's a way to deal with things that are so much bigger than you are. So I think fantasy is special, something to be cherished and protected because it's a very fragile thing and without it, we're so defenseless, we're paralyzed”
― David Gerrold, The Martian Child: A Novel About a Single Father Adopting a Son

“There's this thing that writers talk about--where the characters take on a life of their own and they run away with the story, taking it off to places the author never intended to go. That's what happened here.

Except, that's not what really happens. That's one of the stories that writers tell about storytelling.

What really happened was that I sat and wrote and had a conversation with myself--a conversation that wasn't possible, unless I let part of myself pretend it was someone else--a disembodied voice in the typewriter. And so I typed. I typed everything I felt and feared and worried about, everything I thought I knew, and everything else as well, the much larger domain of what I didn't know and didn't know how to figure out.

Because this, at last, was a place where I could talk to somebody about it all--and if that somebody was really me, that was okay too, because I was the guy who had to figure it out anyway. So I had all these conversations with myself--and these different parts of me talked into the keyboard. And talked and talked and talked.”
― David Gerrold, The Martian Child: A Novel About a Single Father Adopting a Son

“I don't like classifying people by who they fall in love with.”
― David Gerrold, The Martian Child: A Novel About a Single Father Adopting a Son