The best way to write a novel is to do it behind your own back.

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.

I wanted to pull down a book, open it proper, and gobble up page after page

We face dangers every day of which we are not even aware. Often God intervenes on our behalf through the use of His angels.

Women are the only people I am afraid of who I never thought would hurt me

There's something in human beings, not all human beings, that is ready for the change in consciousness. It needs to happen now if humanity is not to destroy itself and the planet.

Everyone has the right to love and worship whoever and whatever they want to. It's nobody's business but theirs. We are not the ones to judge that.

Hamlet and Victor Frankenstein are each obsessed with death. Hamlet's whole story is a philosophical preparation for death; Victor's is an intellectual refusal to accept it.

Perhaps the worst sin in life is knowing right and not doing it.

Sovereignty and the right to rule cannot be conferred on anyone no matter who ... as a result of an academic discussion. Sovereignty is acquired by force and power and violence.

What the New Yorker calls home would seem like a couple of closets to most Americans, yet he manages not only to live there but also to grow trees and cockroaches right on the premises.

You're a mouse studying to be a rat.