In every book I write, I try to name-check the most prominent influences, or the most prominent conscious influences.

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.

God's ways are higher than our ways not because he is less compassionate than we are but because he is more compassionate than we can ever imagine.

Appreciate her for who she is.

Grief is what tells you who you are alone.

It is evident that man never attains to a true self-knowledge until he has previously contemplated the face of God, and come down after such contemplation to look into himself.

If I'm not busy I start twiddling my thumbs.

My Brilliant Career was beautifully directed, but I had a bit of trouble with myself in it. It was a silly script, based on a book this 16-year-old girl wrote.

I was shocked and saddened to learn of the passing of my sister, Joan Fontaine ... and I appreciate the many kind expressions of sympathy that we have received.

Stay worry-free. Show love and you get love.

I like playing really super-intense, live-in-the-moment characters. It asks me to not phone it in. It's impossible to phone it in. Every American boy has spent his childhood pretending to get shot.

Comedy is what happens when you cross the dateline from the unbearable. Things become so unbearable they become a joke.