I suppose in a way most of my characters are non-consumers, not terribly interested in all the little baubles and artifacts of contemporary life.

I try not to become too regular an addict of any one subculture.

I never take any notes or draw charts or make elaborate diagrams, but I hold an image of the shape of a book in my head and work from that mental hologram.

I've never related to the work geek at all-it sounds much more horrible than nerd. Like a freak biting a chicken's head off in a sideshow.

I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me.

Someday I would change my name to Shut Up and save everybody a lot of time.

I work on a laptop specifically so I can work in cafes and pretend I'm part of the human world.

What age is a black boy when he learns he's scary?

It was only as I wrote about fear that I began to find paths of access to feelings that were intolerable to me then.

I want what we all want," said Carl. "To move certain parts of the interior of myself into the exterior world, to see if they can be embraced.

I can't bear the silent ringing in my skull.

I'm a slave to my dogs and go out with them almost every day. They are poorly behaved if they don't run. They really act up.

Keeping a Diary all my life helped me to discover some basic elements essential to the vitality of writing.

You can be! You can have! You can do whatever you want! But you're going to have to free yourself!

If we don't get a grip on government spending, there will be no growth.

In most cases learning something essential in life requires physical pain.

Look round, the wrecks of play behold; Estates dismember'd, mortgaged, sold! Their owners now to jails confin'd, Show equal poverty of mind.

Of all the treasures a state can possess, the human lives of its citizens are for us the most precious.

Hiring people to write code to sell is not the same as hiring people to design and build durable, usable, dependable software.

One of the things I love most about acting is just disappearing in the role, as much as I can. I think that's one of the things that intrigued me about it.