Fate and victory shift ... now this way, now that way -- like a line of unarmored men under a hail of enemy arrows.

No one inspired me to write, but writer Harlan Ellison terrified me into getting published.

I know what cancer was. How is it like humankind?" Sek Hardeen's perfectly modulated, softly accented tones showed a hint of agitation. "We have spread out through the galaxy like cancer cells through a living body, Duré. We multiply without thought to the countless life forms that must die or be pushed aside so that we may breed and flourish. We eradicate competing forms of intelligent life.

You treat violence as an aberration ... when in truth it is the norm. It is the very essence of the human condition.

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.

Every age fraught with discord and danger seems to spawn a leader meant only for that age, a political giant whose absence, in retrospect, seems inconceivable when the history of that age is written.

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