Fantastic fiction covers fantasy, horror and science fiction - and it doesn't get the attention it deserves from the literati.

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 don't love people so much for the good they have done us, as for the good we have done them

That's what marriage is, isn't it? Taking the rough with the smooth. At least, that's what it should be.

There is no blueprint to leadership, quite the conundrum in a business world where standardization is celebrated.

Disturbed to her very soul, Finley could only shake her head. "You ask too much."A crooked grin curved his mouth. "Too much? You strange and wonderful girl, that is the least I'll ask of you.

I never sympathise with the accused unless there's a chance the accused is not guilty, but I certainly don't ever sympathise with the criminal.

We aren't anything in particular. There is no self. There are only ideas and states of mind.

We all have life-defining moments. They are like open-book tests, but we don't know we have been examined until it is over.

True individualists tend to be quite unobservant; it is the snob, the would be sophisticate, the frightened conformist, who keeps a fascinated or worried eye on what is in the wind.

Love is the keynote, Joy is the music, Knowledge is the performer, the Infinite All is the composer and audience.

With 'Girls,' it doesn't really feel like I'm doing TV specifically. It just feels like we're making a really long film.