My ideal life based on my favourite writers

My choice of favourite authors reflects my interests (duh), mainly science and politics. But they each appeal for different reasons. Some writers I would aspire to write like, and some I just want to steal bits of the fictional worlds they create and live them.

I want to be friends with Howard Roark, rogue architect of Ayn Rand’s creation.

I want to write like George Orwell, with clarity and brevity, and have the courage to defend unfashionable political views (but I don’t want to be a socialist).

I want to think like Asimov and Arthur C Clarke – wild ideas that make you gasp.

I want to write novels like Steven Baxter – wild ideas that make you gasp but with a bit more novelistic oomph than Messrs Asimov and Clarke.

I want to live a life and in a world as described by Kim Stanley Robinson – probably some kind of peripatetic scientist in the mix of great events but still taking time out to appreciate the wild and the rocks and the sky.

Life sucks, but it doesn’t have to

The people had come to witness a sensational case, to see celebrities, to get material for conversation, to kill time.  They would return to unwanted jobs, unloved families, unchosen friends, to drawing rooms, evening clothes, cocktail glasses and movies, to unadmitted pain, murdered hope, desire left unreached, left hanging silently over a path on which no step was taken, to days of effort not to think, not to say, to forget and give in and give up. But each of them had known some unforgotten moment – a morning when nothing had happened, a piece of music heard suddenly and never heard in the same way again, a stranger’s face seen in a bus – a moment when each had known a different sense of living.  And each remembered other moments, on a sleepless night, on an afternoon of steady rain, in a church, in an empty street at sunset, when each had wondered why there was so much suffering and ugliness in the world. They had not tried to find the answer and they had gone on living as if no answer were necessary. But each had known a moment when, in lonely, naked honesty, he had felt the need of an answer.

Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead