I deliberately keep myself apart from a lot of stuff; I don't Tweet, I don't do Facebook, I don't blog, and that's largely because I spend my working life staring at a screen and hitting a keyboard, I am trying to cut down on that, not increase it.

I'm saying with very few exceptions nothing lasts forever, and among those exceptions, no work or thought of man is numbered.

It looks perverted and wasteful to us, but then one thing that empires are not about is the efficient use of resources and the spread of happiness; both are typically accomplished despite the economic short-circuiting - corruption and favoritism, mostly- endemic to the system.

There's an old Sysan saying that the soup of life is salty enough without adding tears to it.

Truth, I have learned, differs for everybody. Just as no two people ever see a rainbow in exactly the same place - and yet both most certainly see it, while the person seemingly standing right underneath it does not see it at all - so truth is a question of where one stands, and the direction one is looking in at the time.

Intellectual achievement. The exercise of skill. Human feeling.

I just come up with the stories and write them as well as I can. There's not really a great deal of strokey-beard thinking going on.