I couldn't tell if I was perspicacious or paranoid.

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.

I get lost in the magical beauty that is all around me. My mind is an enchanted magician who mysteriously creates all of that magnificent beauty.

Even the lion has to defend himself against flies.

HOSPITALITY, n. The virtue which induces us to feed and lodge certain persons who are not in need of food and lodging.

It is a bad thing if a writer tackles a subject he does not understand.

I am finished with cities. I spent four years in New York, ten in Paris, and I was in Belgrade for a while. To me now they are just airports.

I love Jesus Christ. I am a Christian... I cry when I see injustice, children dying of hunger.

Generally speaking, rhyme is the marker for the end of a line. The first rhyme-word is like a challenge thrown down, which the poem itself has to respond to.

If you're going to vote yes and change the law. You have to know what's in it. You can't depend on other people.

Nobody says, 'Yeah, I'd like to set myself up for some serious criticism!' And yet, the only way to be remarkable is to do just that.

My dad can be pretty critical sometimes.