I don't like allegory.

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.

A great man is different from an eminent one in that he is ready to be the servant of the society.

From my big beautiful warlock brain, welcome to 'Sheen's Korner' ... You're either in my corner, or you're with the trolls.

What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing

To reach your potential you must grow. And to grow, you must be highly intentional about it.

I wasn't in any way a kind of soothsayer or not surprised when Sept. 11 happened. I was absolutely shocked.

I never know which is worse: the sorrow when you hit the bird or the shame when you miss it.

Sometimes what we deem a failure at the time it happens actually serves to foster a change within us that creates an even greater success down the road.

When we live our lives everyday, we're met by opportunities, and most of us don't even recognize them.

To rove about, musing, that is to say loitering, is, for a philosopher, a good way of spending time.

Sometimes Sarah [Chalke] starts to talk about Iraq or whatever and she gets all excited, like I actually give a crap what she's saying. Come on, she's a woman. But still, it's very cute.