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.

I always turn in my books on time, so you can always count on a book coming out when it's supposed to.

I think now I'm up to something like 85 different titles that I've published.

A moment of consideration often prevents a thousand apologies

I did several interesting jobs, working in restaurants, I worked at a lab rat farm, feeding and watering all these rats. Then I got a full-time job as a technical writer for a large scientific research laboratory.

I had a minor in Russian history, and this was at the time when the big Cold War was going on.

There will come a time of fire and night, when enemies rise and empires fall, when the stars themselves begin to die.