The best way to write a novel is to do it behind your own back.

There is no knowing beyond that membrane, the meniscus of death. What can be seen from here is distorted, refracted. All we can know are those untrustworthy glimpses--that and rumour. The prattle. The dead gossip: it is the reverberation of that gossip against the surface tension of death that the better mediums hear. It is like listening to whispered secrets through a toilet door. It is a crude and muffled susurrus.

I'll tell you, I've never particularly been a Trek person. I feel about Trek the way one feels about known, vaguely liked, but rather distant members of one's family.

There are only so many ways to experience pain. There are an almost limitless number of ways to inflict it, but the pain itself, initially vividly distinct in all its specifications, becomes, inevitably, just pain.

My job is not to try to give readers what they want but to try to make readers want what I give.

I remember vividly what it's like to read as a 10-year-old - that passionate inhabiting of a book.

A scholar can never let mere wrongness get in the way of the theory.