I remember vividly what it's like to read as a 10-year-old - that passionate inhabiting of a book.

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.

Humanity is defined by its struggles, not doomed by them. It is in the way we endure those struggles that we transcend our lower nature and enter a higher realm.

I've got nothing against girls in tight sweaters - darn it!

Each of your excursions is balanced by the strengthening of the tonal.

I've been doing stand-up 29 years; there is no other career when you're finding your stride 30 years into it.

I think the day that I become comfortable doing interviews and going on talk shows is the day that I don't know what it is to be a human being anymore.

A severe disease that transmits easily will leave very little international surge capacity as most countries will need their own staff and resources to combat the outbreak in their territories.

Reading makes me feel I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. ... Reading is bliss.

I believe in the separation of church and state, but I do not believe in the separation of politics from religion.

My signature style is super uniformed. I like black pants, black blazers, and boots.

In order to serve its purpose, a vision has to be a shared vision.