Science fiction is really a rather tiny business compared with its giant cousin, which is fantasy.

How could anyone survive even a single day, if he didn't feel as if he was, in some little great way, needed?

For honest insight into who you are, don't ask yourself what your priorities are for next week. Ask what your priorities were last week.

To improve as a player you need to not only know how you plan to win, but ... how might your opponent disrupt your plan.

A community is a small group working together. Community scales by adding groups, and building connections between them, not enlarging them.

The burden of intelligence: you can always imagine all those wonderful places where you can never belong.

A brilliant mind was never as clever as three average minds sniffing after something of interest.

A community that learns together excels together. We need to form communities that learn together.

I live for those rare and delicious moments when the words on the page take off and I am the bystander, watching as the tale shows me what will happen next.

I've always thought of science fiction as being, at some level, a 19th-century business.

Occasionally, I'll dream I'm in the factory. That will help me write. Not creatively, but more like a prod. I don't want to go back there.

To write a novel is to dream while awake, then express the dream to the reader in an absorbing way. The road leading from the writer's inner world to the readers' is paved with prose.

Were it not for imagination a man would be as happy in arms of a chambermaid as of a duchess.

My notion of the KGB came from romantic spy stories. I was a pure and utterly successful product of Soviet patriotic education.

The road is not a problem. It's not any more tempting. People don't come up with giant bags of drugs or gallons of alcohol and say, 'You've got to do this.' It happens to me more at home.

Success doesn't happen in a vacuum. You’re only as good as the people you work with and the people you work for.

Only when we have done all we knew to do can we wait by faith for God to do what only He can do.

The principle of life is that life responds by corresponding; your life becomes the thing you have decided it shall be.

Our military strength is a prerequisite to peace, but let it be clear we maintain this strength in the hope it will never be used.

There is so much poverty and desperation in South Sudan, and yet each side is militarily equipped.

Human rights are not worthy of the name if they do not protect the people we don't like as well as those we do.