People will always tell stories. The publishing industry might vanish, but not stories.

Despite all that I know rationally, and everything that I can put into words, I can say that I have difficulty giving up the notion of the nobility of art.

Cliché activates the comfortable mental laziness, we sort of revert to the domain of the already-familiar, what we have already imagined so that it doesn't seem that bad.

The beauty of literature - also its limit - is that it is inescapably personal, even if you're writing science fiction.

No reader owes me anything - I am owed nothing for my noble efforts, because my writing was always unconditional, always coming out of inner necessity.

What fiction and art can do, particularly narrative art, is construct consciousness - in a sense, we have to do it for the first time, every time.

Language is so inherent to humanity, so necessary for even basic thinking, that stories and poetry are available to anyone who can process language.