History viewed from the inside is always a dark, digestive mess, far different from the easily recognizable cow viewed from afar by historians.

There are many other writers whose work I admire tremendously, but none whose work struck me at just the right young age. Jack Vance taught me that speculative fiction, science fiction, could be wonderfully and liberatingly stylistic. It didn't have to be pulp stuff. He really changed my writing and my view of science fiction, so if nothing else, my little homage to him in the novelette I wrote for that anthology is my thank-you to him. He helped me see that any genre can have excellent writing in it.

How could anyone stay sane with entire lifetimes stored in one human mind?

It's odd how violence and humor so often go together, isn't it?

Seduction... was both a science and art - a blend of skill, discipline, proximity, and opportunity. Mostly proximity.

Books ... were merely nodes in a near-infinite matrix of information that exists in four dimensions, evolving toward the idea of the concept of the approximation of the shadow of Truth vertically through time as well as longitudinally through knowledge.

His imagination was always more real than the reality of daily life.