Science fiction is an amazing literature: plot elements that you would think would be completely worn out by now keep changing into surprising new forms.

I hate sequels. They're never as good as the first book.

Actually, writers have no business writing about their own works. They either wax conceited, saying things like: 'My brilliance is possibly most apparent in my dazzling short story, "The Cookiepants Hypotenuse."' Or else they get unbearably cutesy: 'My cat Ootsywootums has given me all my best ideas, hasn't oo, squeezums?

I learned everything I know about plot from Dame Agatha (Christie).

And every place and time an author writes about is imaginary, from Oz to Raymond Chandler's L.A. to Dickens's London.

A Grand Design we couldn't see because we were part of it. A Grand Design we only got occasional, fleeting glimpses of. A Grand Design involving the entire course of history and all of time and space that, for some unfathomable reason, chose to work out its designs with cats and croquet mallets and penwipers, to say nothing of the dog. And a hideous piece of Victorian artwork. And us.

Everyone else had the look of tired patience people always got when listening to a sermon, no matter what the century.