I'd never understood the injunction not to regret anything, couldn't see how that wasn't cowardice.

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.

...a third [of three] had died in his bunk of natural causes--for a dagger in the heart quite naturally ends one's life.

You have to nourish your creativity for it to flourish...

There's huge opportunities to continue to improve efficiency in the way the government operates and improve the way government provides services to its citizens.

Anything is possible with Trump.

I'd much rather be a one-hit wonder than a phony.

We are going to have to do something about all this violence, or people are going to keep buying tickets.

Donald Trump was not a businessman to be admired, but an example of what's wrong with discriminatory corporate America.

I think predictability has become the rule and I'm completely the opposite -- I like spectators to be disturbed.

I would like to step out of my heart and go walking beneath the enormous sky.

I have a job that I truly love, and an enormous crew of people that can do things better than I can!