Every book I write, the first thing I have to do is get into the voice, and the voice varies from book to book - that's part of what's interesting to me.

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.

Money won't buy happiness, but it will pay the salaries of a huge research staff to study the problem.

To trifle with Scripture is to deprive yourself of its aid. Reverence it, and look up to God with devout gratitude for having given it to you.

That's the happiest moment. When it's all done. When we stop. When we can stop.

Son, heed my instruction, and apply thyself to know women; let thine eyes observe her when she is with another, for what she doeth with him, she will do with thee, also.

Picasso once remarked I do not care who it is that has or does influence me as long as it is not myself.

It's nice to live through a good moment and be able to share it with someone else. Otherwise, what sense would it have? Selfishly, it doesn't give you that much.

I didn't know what would take my mind off the sexy Spartan, except for maybe a total lobotomy.

For memory is a moral action, a choice. You can choose to remember. You can choose not.

Mindfulness - moment to moment non-judgemental attention and awareness.

Life is about chasing after the things you think are truly worth it, even if they don't happen, I'd rather have nothing but know I didn't settle for something I didn't want!