It was like there was a pile of kindling that was in the back of my imagination just waiting there. Once I lit it, it just flared up and I kept getting ideas and ideas.

When tending a vast and beautiful garden, you have to plant many seeds, never knowing ahead of time which ones will germinate, which will produce the most glorious flowers, which will bear the sweetest fruit. A good gardener plants them all, tends and nurtures them, and wishes them well. Optimism is the best fertilizer.

Do you want Columbus to go across the ocean, or do you want to put a message in a bottle and hope that it lands somewhere? I'd rather have actual people be there. Whether they look like Americans or like the inhabitants of some other country, depends on who has the most drive.

My wife and I are involved in writing/publishing/promotion twenty-four/seven. It isn't a day job; it's life.

Of course you don't make any noise in space, because there's no air.

For a feature in next month's issue of Prog magazine, the photographer spent many hours setting up a photo shoot of me with part of my music collection in my writing office. Since I do most of my writing outside in nature, we felt this shot was most representative.

I think that somebody with the resources and innovation and the idea is going to come out of nowhere and come up with a successful space travel program.