Life & Wisdom Quote by Alan Dean Foster

He frames authorship not as destiny but as a practical jailbreak. The childhood dream isn’t “to tell stories,” it’s to move - to trespass into the inaccessible. That’s the quiet power of the line: science fiction isn’t presented as escapism, but as a technology for mobility, a passport that works when money, geography, and circumstance don’t. Foster’s intent is to de-romanticize the origin myth while still honoring wonder; he became a writer because the genre solved a problem his life couldn’t.

The subtext tilts toward class and constraint. “Places that were otherwise inaccessible” suggests more than alien planets; it hints at the locked doors of ordinary life, the way most people’s horizons are policed by economics, institutions, and expectation. In that light, “I was going to be a lawyer” reads like a socially legible track: respectable, lucrative, predictable. Then he drops the punchline: “but I got saved.” It’s lightly comic, but the phrasing borrows the cadence of religious testimony, recasting career choice as conversion. The joke lands because it treats law as the false church - a life of rules and sanctioned arguments - and science fiction as the messy faith that delivers him to himself.

Context matters: Foster is a workmanlike giant of popular SF, famous for making other worlds feel navigable, not ornamental. This quote doubles as a mission statement for that kind of writing: not elitist speculation, but a reliable vehicle. The explorer dream never died; it just traded a compass for a keyboard.