I feel fantastically geeky. [But] I'm not one of those people who's enormously proud of being a geek, but nor am I particularly ashamed of 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.

~ Not every poem is meant for oral stimulation, some are better devoured mentally.

Fear is the tax that conscience pays to guilt.

I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.

What can laws do without morals?

Ideas came with explosive immediacy, like an instant birth. Human thought is like a monstrous pendulum; it keeps swinging from one extreme to the other.

Energy markets can be thought of as suffering from appendicitis due to fossil fuel subsidies. They need to be removed for a healthy energy economy.

The poor too often turn away unheard, From hearts that shut against them with a sound That will be heard in heaven.

The mind can be but full. It will be as much filled with a small disagreeable occurrence, having no other, as with a large one.

Life begins at age forty.