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.

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.

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.

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.

To the romantic soul, the rituals of Valentine's Day echo every day of the year.

Vampire Willow Rosenberg: "In my world, we have people in chains, and we can ride them like ponies.

The engineering is secondary to the vision.

It sometimes happens that the town child is more alive to the fresh beauty of the country than a child who is country born

For us to go to Italy and to penetrate into Italy is like a most fascinating act of self-discovery

It doesn't matter what people call you unless they call you pigeon pie and eat you up.

Sometimes I see myself reflected too closely in other men for comfort, and then I have an enormous wish to believe in the saints, in heroic virtue.

"Do not worry in the least about yourself, leave all worry to God" this appears to be the commandment in all religions.

Stories worked much the same way . . . A false note at the beginning was much more costly than one nearer the end because early errors were part of the foundation.

Everybody blames the Jews for killing Christ, and the Jews try to pass it off on the Romans. I'm one of the few people who believes it was the blacks.