To the gods belong power, and to us the work of our hands.

I love biomedical science, I love astronomy, and you can't really do much with those in a fantasy setting.

There are relatively few science fiction or fantasy books with the main character being an old person.

Normal' is a dryer setting.

I regarded drugs as somewhat like rattlesnakes - it's possible to pick one up without getting bit, but why bother?

There is simple ignorance, not knowing, and willful ignorance that refuses to know, that covers the light of knowledge with the dark blanket of bias.

It may be far in the future, but there's some kind of logical way to get from where we are to where the science fiction is.

So when I got out of the military, I went back to school in biology, and earned a biology degree at the University of Texas, and then did some graduate work in it.

My first degree came years before my second. I had wanted to be a physicist, but I flunked calculus.

Hard to be a physics major at Rice University if you have flunked calculus.

I've taught Sunday school, I've sung in the choir, I directed a choir.

If I had to embrace a definition of success, it would be that success is making the best choices we can . . . and accepting them.

When they told me I couldn't sit on the Senate floor with an iPad - that the technology wasn't even permitted - I breathed deep and knew that I was going to have to start pushing.

I put a metronome up to all the songs, and I tried to really keep it true to the original tempos.

Children in the 21st (century) have been transformed from net producers of their own toy and play culture, to net consumers of play culture imposed by adults.

Worry is interest paid in advance on a debt that never comes due.

I never take anything for granted. I may slip any minute.

Planned obsolescence is another word for progress.

If I was president of the good old U.S.A., I'd turn the churches into strip clubs and watch the whole world pray.

There's no use going to school unless your final destination is the library.

I have the rare privilege of talking to my dad every night at 10 p.m. and hearing about what he did that day.