...where's the skill in being a hero if you were always destined to do it?

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.

There's a lot of talk these days about giving children self-esteem. It's not something you can give

Whereas moral courage is the righting of wrongs, creative courage, in contrast, is the discovering of new forms, new symbols, new patterns on which a new society can be built.

Those who suffer much, have much to say.

They say that the best furniture and clothing design from the '50s and '60s is Scandinavian or Milanese.

Acting is a business and a political act and a craft, but I also feel like it's a service - specifically, for a military audience.

There is only one way by which you can achieve prosperity. It is to take charge of your mind.

A man of genius is unbearable, unless he possesses at least two things besides: gratitude and purity.

It is not enough for poems to be fine; they must charm, and draw the mind of the listener at will.

A man can't just sit around.

It is in the turmoil of chaos that we discover what, if anything, we are.