Is it treason to say the truth? A bitter truth, but no less true for that.

I had these cheap alien toys and I made up stories for them. They were space pirates. They didn’t have names so I made up names. These were the first stories I wrote. Even as a little kid I was thinking about torture.

The cable makers are the ones who are willing to take risks and do something original and push the envelope some.

I try to make the readers feel they've lived the events of the book. Just as you grieve if a friend is killed, you should grieve if a fictional character is killed. You should care. If somebody dies and you just go get more popcorn, it's a superficial experience isn't it?

Sleep is a little death, dreams the whisperings of the Other, who would drag us all into his eternal night.

We're setting up mechanisms where we can kill human beings with drones and missiles where you're sitting at a console and pressing the button. We never have to hear their whimpering, or hear them begging for their mother, or dying in horrible realities around us. I don't know if that's necessarily such a good thing.

One of the hardest parts of writing is writing from the gut or the heart or something like that rather than intellectually.