I like the idea of trying to write a book in every genre.

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.

Fear was about possibilities. Not things that happened. Things that might.

Good character is not formed in a week or a month. It is created little by little, day by day. Protracted and patient effort is needed to develop good character.

In a portrait, you have room to have a point of view. The image may not be literally what's going on, but it's representative.

I'm also involved in the rights of the disabled and do some fundraising for that and I thought it would have been a big boost for the campaign but it couldn't be worked out.

Youth is a frame of mind. If you get out there and enjoy it, you can have it at any time of your life.

Failure is a signpost to turn you in another direction.

The discovery of the unconscious is a great spiritual undertaking.

The world is a world of tears, and the burdens of mortality touch the heart.

There is nothing so fretting and vexatious, nothing so justly terrible to tyrants, and their tools and abettors, as a free press.

Sonny Boy Williamson (II) was a beautiful guy, a straight guy... (but) he was always raising hell one way or another, so you never could tell if he was drunk or sober.