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.

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.

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.

Love yourself first to love others.

wisdom is great, but sometimes, those who think they are wiser than others can become the otherwise

The only way to find peace is to face the unknown and trust that God has heard your tears.

Just as the brain has its own way of operating, the ears another, the eyes yet another, and the body, fingers and toes yet another means, our intuition can be further divided into separate skills.

I don't want to be famous. I like to be able to sit in a cafe and watch the world go by and observe people.

To heal illness, begin by restoring balance.

I can't just decide myself what's being built. Someone decides what they want, then I work for them.

Nothing can be lower or more wholly instrumental than the substance and cause of all things.

Those who want respect, give respect.

How many emperors and how many princes have lived and died and no record of them remains, and they only sought to gain dominions and riches in order that their fame might be ever-lasting.