Life & Wisdom Quote by Steven Brust

Paranoia usually gets dismissed as a private defect: an overactive imagination, a personality glitch, a failure of nerve. Brust flips that comfort on its head. He grants the paranoid their favorite premise - yes, sometimes there is a "they", and sometimes "they" really are out to get you - then refuses to let the mindset off the hook. The line’s sting is that being right about the threat doesn’t automatically make your response rational.

The intent is to separate two things we constantly blur: external danger and internal distortion. Even in a world where surveillance is real, institutions retaliate, and social mobs can coordinate like weather systems, paranoia remains a style of thinking. It narrows the field of vision, turns coincidence into plot, converts vigilance into identity. Brust’s syntax does the work: the first clause indulges conspiracy with a wink; the second clause lands like a diagnosis. The humor isn’t cute - it’s corrective.

As a working genre novelist, Brust writes from terrain where plots are literal: assassins, empires, betrayals, the machinery of power. That’s why the quote travels so well outside fantasy circles. It reads like advice for modern life: you can have receipts and still be spiraling; you can be targeted and still misinterpret everything else. The subtext is almost moral: reality can validate your fear without sanctifying it. Paranoia isn’t disproved by danger - it’s revealed by what danger does to your mind.