If there is a true religion in the universe, it must include the truth of contact or be forever hollow.

I loved almost everything about being a teacher, but I was an unusual teacher

Once upon a time ... the only autonomous intelligences we humans knew of were us humans. We thought then that if humankind ever devised another intelligence that it would be the result of a huge project ... a great mass of silicon and ancient transistors and chips and circuit boards ... a machine with lots of networking circuits, in other words, aping-if you will pardon the expression-the human brain in form and function. Of course, AIs did not evolve that way. They sort of slipped into existence when we humans were looking the other way.

Prison always has been a good place for writers, killing, as it does, the twin demons of mobility and diversion

Wilkie Collins was a rival and competitor of Dickens. His novel Moonstone sold more copies at the time than Dickens' last two books. But that meant nothing in the long run. Right now, to be honest, Wilkie Collins is what he deserved to be back then: a footnote, an almost lost memory. And he knew he would become that.

It's one of the strangest attributes of this profession that when we writers get exhausted writing one thing, we relax by writing another.

Nothing helps an artist's career more than a little death and obscurity.