I think we take the history we want to take in order to back up the stories we want to hear.

"Romanticizing the past" is a familiar accusation, made mostly by people who think it is more grown-up to romanticize the future.

We like to think that the fate of the Earth and the fate of human worlds are the same thing, but we're not as important as that.

In most novels, the landscape, or the place, in which the story takes part is simply a backdrop to the human action.

Hope, like despair, is something of a distraction: it gets in the way of a clear view of the horizon.

The world we are in today is likely to end catastrophically, as many other human worlds have done before.

A man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest. I think that kind of thing is an abuse of history.

It's always hard for an author to determine his own intentions, especially in retrospect.

Well, I don't like the first bit and I don't know the last bit. So I'm really hoping the middle bit is exceptional.

Successful business is always almost dishonest

The trouble with opportunity is that it always comes disguised as hard work.

So I draw because I feel like it might be my only real chance to escape the reservation.

I like to think I get better with age, but maybe absence makes the heart grow fonder.

In the office, the mail that came in was always 10 to 1 for me.

When you get to political machines that can control a state, then you're really into organized crime - almost. You're fighting a political mafia.

I'm a political conservative.

Of Planets, struggling fierce towards heaven's free wilderness.

Hillary Clinton's exposed more of our top secret documents than any Secretary of State in history.