Scars are memory. Like sutures. They stitch the past to me.

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.

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.

Every book I write, the first thing I have to do is get into the voice, and the voice varies from book to book - that's part of what's interesting to me.

The faith comes by hearing

I think sometimes a narrative can come out of a single word.

“Nothing's impossible,” Poppet responds. She smiles at him and jumps, her red hair trailing out behind her as she falls.

Anything can be art. Anything can be self-expression . Now you take the weapon and run with it.

You might be a redneck if you think the Mountain Men in Deliverance were just misunderstood.

A civilization is as great as its dreams, and its dreams are dreamt by artists.

We have our own brains.

[General James Mattis] a very talented individual. He's - has a personal library of about 10,000 books and he's read most of them on military history and strategy and so forth.

Everything that would begin to make somebody a good student would tend to make him or her a poor artist, and vice versa.