Art & Creativity Quote by Orson Scott Card

Card’s answer performs a neat writerly sleight of hand: it offers the comfort of canon while quietly undercutting the whole premise of “all-time favorites.” Dropping The Lord of the Rings is a signal flare - not just taste, but lineage. It aligns him with mythic architecture, morally legible worldbuilding, and the long shadow Tolkien casts over modern fantasy and sci-fi. Then he pivots to Guns, Germs, and Steel, a book that flatters the reader’s appetite for big, systems-level explanations. Fiction as enchantment, nonfiction as master key: two different kinds of narrative power, both sweeping, both totalizing.

The last line is the tell. “Ask me again next week” rejects the interviewer's trap - the idea that a person can be reduced to a stable shortlist. It’s also a subtle defense of reading as weather, not identity: what moves you depends on what you’re trying to solve emotionally or intellectually right now. Coming from a professional storyteller, it’s a reminder that preferences are plot, not portrait.

There’s subtextual self-positioning here, too. Card’s work often wrestles with ethics, power, and the unintended consequences of grand decisions; pairing Tolkien’s epic moral universe with Diamond’s civilizational determinism sketches the kind of mental terrain he wants to be associated with. The variability clause keeps him agile: it suggests curiosity over loyalty, and it dodges the tribalism of taste-making. Favorites, he implies, are less like trophies and more like tools.