I think the role of science fiction is not at all to prophesy. I think it is to tell interesting, vivid, strange stories that at their best are dreamlike intense versions and visions of today.

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.

How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape.

Our head is designed to broaden our perspective regarding the world around us

It’s about recognizing that the great movements and moments in history laid on the backs of ordinary people who simply chose to do extraordinary things.

There is always some madness in love.

It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.

On your birthday today, don't Look up 'Life Expectancy' coz I suspect As you've reached 60, you want to be happy, Trust me, you'll be depressed.

I'm surprised I wasn't sent to therapy in the childhood to be honest. I think my parents must have gotten a kick out of it.

Honestly, all I ever do is work.

American foreign policy is now one huge big mystery. Simply put, the administration is trying to lead the world with a feel-good foreign policy.

Confucius does his crossword with a pen.