Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, a four-volume work so dense that its readers were evenly divided between those who understood it and thought it was brilliant and those who did not understand it and thought it was brilliant.

The 10,000-hours rule says that if you look at any kind of cognitively complex field, from playing chess to being a neurosurgeon, we see this incredibly consistent pattern that you cannot be good at that unless you practice for 10,000 hours, which is roughly ten years, if you think about four hours a day.

The religious paradigm and the science fiction paradigm are different. Apologies to science fiction fans, but the paradigm there is to create a new world and describe it with a kind of specificity that we describe the world we inhabit. Religiosity, on the other hand, does none of that.

Does that mean we should give up? Probably. But there are two issues worth considering. The first is - is it really true that drugs destroy the integrity of the game?

Performance ought to improve with experience, and pressure is an obstacle that the diligent can overcome.

Television allows the audience to argue with the creator in a way you don't in a movie.

I write my books to challenge my own feelings and theories. Perhaps most surprising was what I learned about rice farming. It was really interesting to think of how different Asian and Western cultures are as a result of the kinds of agricultural practices that our ancestors used for thousands of years. The life of a Chinese peasant in the Middle Ages was so dramatically different from the life of a European peasant - night and day different.