Anything for gold and experience.

I have danced with the spider. I have cut a caper with the dancing mad god.

I do, however, feel reasonably strongly the sense that the job of a piece of argumentative scholarly non-fiction is not the same as the job of a piece of fiction.

Ever since I was two, I've loved octopuses, monsters, abandoned buildings.

Scars are memory. Like sutures. They stitch the past to me.

Any moment called NOW is always full of possibles.

Fantasy and science fiction can be literal as well as allegorical and there’s nothing wrong with enjoying a monster like a giant squid for what it is, as well as searching for metaphor.

My job is not to try to give readers what they want but to try to make readers want what I give.

I'll never be a minimalist. The fact that the prose is more tightly controlled doesn't for a minute mean that it's minimalist. I very much like arcane words and baroque sentence structure.

A scholar can never let mere wrongness get in the way of the theory.

My sustenance is information. My interventions are hidden. I increase as I learn. I compute, so I am.

We have an obligation to feel guilty." The words came out of her lips as if she were reciting an elegy. "Guilty. Because we kill the ones we love.

Perfect isn't normal, nor is it interesting. I have no features without makeup. I am pale. I have blond lashes. You could just paint my face - it's like a blank canvas. It can be great for what I do.

Sometimes superheroes are born, sometimes they are made. Sometimes they make themselves. Sometimes all it takes is will.

You never want to be forced to do something. But the world around you starts to influence you in ways you never expected.

Work should be for all of us a word as honorable and appealing as patriotism.

I like it when every pitch counts. There are a lot of people who see it as a negative, but I try to feed off it.

I was very spiritual as a kid. I think I felt and thought about things a lot more deeply than most of the other kids my age. I wanted to help people.

Family pride entertains many unsocial opinions.

We are inadvertently in love with the Influence of Power and we need to be in love with the Power of Influence.

Evil had to manifest itself and fulfill its role, so that ultimately Good could prevail. [...] Evil needs to manifest itself, for them to understand the value of Good.