Personally I don't like it when writers become excessively proscriptive about the way that people read their books.

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.

Doing is a quantum leap from imagining.

After a devastating loss, your whole perspective shifts, and you're kind of in a blank space. You feel like on one side nothing matters, and on the other side a freedom because nothing matters.

I do feel free, I have patched things up with my ex-husband to the degree of this real friendship. We spend a lot of time together as a family with our son, no way will we be man and wife again.

Have fun, be active. Ride a bike instead of driving, for example.

You know you’re writing well when you're throwing good stuff into the wastebasket.

The truth was that I could not manage my soul, and I was becoming aware of old age because of my weakness in the face of love.

Everything we see is but a mirror of what we are.

Helping Africans navigate the transition to modernity with a huge, wonderful wildlife resource still intact.

Misery loves company, but happy is a better friend.

I know you've run away - everybody gets the urge to do that some time - but sooner or later you'll want to go home.