London is an endless skirmish between angles and emptiness.

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.

Love, above all things, is a commitment to your choice.

The main source of good discipline is growing up in a loving family, being loved and learning to love in return.

It is because we are all impostors that we endure each other. The man who does not consent to lie will see the earth shrink under his feet: we are biologically obliged to the false

Gratitude, in most men, is only a strong and secret hope of greater favors.

Character, character, character. First, second and third ... we were pretty rusty initially. When you have a break for a few weeks you get a bit of rust.

If we are out of synch with ourselves, everything is out of synch for us.

Love says: I’ve seen the ugly parts of you, and I’m staying.

I like to get people fired up, fill them with zeal for McDonald's, and watch the results in their work.

I'm not a cheerleader. I'm not trying to pretend to be sweet and then come out and be bad. This is who I am.

Our jovial star reigned at his birth.