But I think, and hope, that the novels can be understood and enjoyed as science fiction, on their own terms.

I knew that I wanted to be a writer even before I knew exactly what being a writer entailed

Each heart has its graveyard, each household its dead, And knells ring around us wherever we tread, And the feet that awhile made our pathway so bright Pass on to a land that is out of our sight.

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

War must never be a condition but, rather, a temporary scourge which we suffer as a child does a fever, knowing that health follows the long night of pain and that peace is health.

The Victorians, they were like the Germans in World War II. They could not stop recording details about their lives and their age.

Life doesn't retreat.