If you believe you can make a living as a writer, you already have enough ego.

You don't have conversations with microprocessors. You tell them what to do, then helplessly watch the disaster when they take you literally!

When it comes to privacy and accountability, people always demand the former for themselves and the latter for everyone else.

It is said that power corrupts, but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power.

The village is coming back, like it or not.

In all of history, we have found just one cure for error—a partial antidote against making and repeating grand, foolish mistakes, a remedy against self-deception. That antidote is criticism.

Why must conversions always come so late? Why do people always apologize to corpses?

The worst mistake of first contact, made throughout history by individuals on both sides of every new encounter, has been the unfortunate habit of making assumptions. It often proved fatal.

My first duty to write a gripping yarn. Second is to convey credible characters who make you feel what they feel. Only third comes the idea.

But honestly, if you do a rigorous survey of my work, I'll bet you'll find that biology is a theme far more often than physical science.

Gaia spins on, silently contemplating what it means to be born into a sarcastic universe.

It is not usually our ideas that make us optimists or pessimists, but it is our optimism or pessimism that makes our ideas.

It is a fact that one man can be deliriously happy in the exact situation that causes another man to wither from depression.

Never take literally what is said out of anger! They are said just to hurt you – sometimes the opposite could be true!

Well I think after leaving prison, and having written three diaries about life in prison, it became a sort of a new challenge to write another novel, to write a new novel.

Soloing is serious business, because you can be seriously dead.

I thought about going to NYU film school - that was this ideal to me. But I didn't make any kind of grades in high school.

I really don't know how to be anyone else, and whenever I try to be anyone else, I fail miserably. Or I disappoint myself. It doesn't build my self-esteem, and it doesn't help me grow me at all.

The Senkaku islands are inherently Japanese territory. I want to show my strong determination to prevent this from changing.

When a man says his word is as his bond - get his bond.