You want the mystical understanding of the cosmos to feel compatible with a scientific understanding of the cosmos, like it extends our understanding rather than unwriting it.

I think my first love is film. There's something about the span of it and the completion of the experience. You sit down for two hours, in the dark, and you go somewhere else, and then you come back, having completed a journey.

I mean that much more than wiser beings from beyond the stars bringing us enlightenment or death or salvation, we are likely to find ourselves the wisest beings on the scene.

I never stopped loving the deeper sciences, and I read as deeply into lay science as I can.

The more you learn about the real vastness of space and the real challenges of space travel, the more completely you appreciate the necessity of taking very good care of this world and being good stewards of it.

The reality of space travel I think is somewhere in the middle. We will get there, it will be hard, it will take a long time, and in the end, the most extraordinary thing we will find when we get there will be ourselves.

When a new writer comes onto a project, he'll make wholesale changes just to mark the territory or for greater credit.