Is it more childish and foolish to insist that there is a conspiracy or that there is not?

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.

L'éternité, c'est long ... surtout vers la fin.

Good film, television, or music keeps you awake, anxious for the next movement or act, and wanting more when it is finished.

As our heart summons our strength, our wisdom must direct it.

Credit . . . is the only enduring testimonial to man's confidence in man.

A health to the nut-brown lass, With the hazel eyes: let it pass. . . . . As much to the lively grey 'Tis as good i' th' night as day: . . . . She's a savour to the glass, And excuse to make it pass.

I believe all that God ever revealed, and I never hear of a man being damned for believing too much; but they are damned for unbelief.

If you fall, get back up. That's what life is about.

I think that our experiences are quite often colored by our cultural and religious beliefs.

I enjoy being influenced by other writers.

The theory which follows is entirely based on a calculus of pleasure and pain; and the object of economics is to maximize happiness by purchasing pleasure, as it were, at the lowest cost of pain.