Socialism and SF are the two most fundamental influences in my life.

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.

An inferiority complex distorts reality

If you cannot score just a point each day, you shall score zero points at the end of your days

I prayed for someone to love me as much as I loved you. Eventually I came to see that that Someone was me.

Dorothy: Shut up, just shut up. You had me at "hello".- From Jerry Maguire, 1996

When I was born I did lament and cry And now each day doth shew the reason why.

The sexually insatiable woman is to be found primarily, if not exclusively, in the ideology of feminism, the hopes of boys, and the fears of men.

The draft that finally goes to my editor doesn't get into her hands until I have read it out loud innumerable times - sometimes into a tape recorder - to make sure that it sounds right.

It is curious and interesting to notice what an attraction a fussy, mincing, nickel-plated word has for you.

It wouldn't kill you to get me an iced coffee." "No, but not getting killed doing something is not a very compelling reason to do it.

Brain surgery is a terrible profession. If I did not feel it will become different in my lifetime, I should hate it.