The worst mistake of first contact, made throughout history by individuals on both sides of every new encounter, has been the unfortunate habit of making assumptions. It often proved fatal.

You don't have conversations with microprocessors. You tell them what to do, then helplessly watch the disaster when they take you literally!

When it comes to privacy and accountability, people always demand the former for themselves and the latter for everyone else.

It is said that power corrupts, but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power.

The village is coming back, like it or not.

In all of history, we have found just one cure for error—a partial antidote against making and repeating grand, foolish mistakes, a remedy against self-deception. That antidote is criticism.

Why must conversions always come so late? Why do people always apologize to corpses?

If you believe you can make a living as a writer, you already have enough ego.

My first duty to write a gripping yarn. Second is to convey credible characters who make you feel what they feel. Only third comes the idea.

But honestly, if you do a rigorous survey of my work, I'll bet you'll find that biology is a theme far more often than physical science.

Gaia spins on, silently contemplating what it means to be born into a sarcastic universe.

A recurring problem needs nothing but a tactical head-on solution. The more you entertain your problems, the more your entertain unhappiness!

From that day on it was as if Ren freed me from gravity. I was floating in the sky. Higher. Higher. Higher.

I find it hard to see how my northern cousins could get so worked up about counties created by British imperialists.

Sooner or later, everyone's story has an unfortunate event or two...The solution, of course, is to stay as far away from the world as possible and lead a safe, simple life.

The more work you put in on your outline and getting the skeleton of your story right, the easier the process is later.

I grew up in a scientific world, the son of a neurosurgeon.

History is clarified experience.

I think that we're beginning to globalize medicine now. You have to take Eastern approaches and bring them to the West, and share West with the East.

Dabbling in music and being in music when I was young I had my own view of what I thought music was whether it was jazz, r&b, or hip hop.

A sympathetic person is placed in the dilemma of a swimmer among drowning men, who all catch at him, and if he gives so much as a leg or a finger, they will drown him.