I know that part of the reason I read Tolkien when I'm ill is that there is an almost total absence of sexuality in his world, which is restful.

...it is not possible to create the opposite of what one has always known, simply because the opposite is believed to be desired. Human beings need what they already know, even horrors.

Books that change you, even later in life, give you a kind of electrical shock as the world takes a different shape.

I did a lot of my writing as though I was an academic, doing some piece of research as perfectly as possible.

Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.

Lists are a form of power.

No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.