Don't wait until you're 'in the mood.' Get into the mood by writing.

The way love feels is always only approximate. I would like to be without shame. I would like to be shameless. I would like to be ignorant. Then I would not know how ignorant I was.

We're facing growing climate change, more floods, more droughts, more crisis on a planetary level, and the systems we put in place in the twentieth century are just not going to work. We've run out of stuff. Our big problems are going to be energy supplies and food supplies. This is not a right-left issue. It's a people issue, and it cuts across all our categories.

I sometimes felt as if these marks on my body were a kind of code, which blossomed, then faded, like invisible ink held to a candle. But if they were a code, who held the key to it? I was sand, I was snow — written on, rewritten, smoothed over.

I was warped early by Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe. I was very fond of Franz Kafka.

I am rather saddened at the end of a book. I think most writers find this. It's like a friend departing on a voyage.

Speculative fiction encompasses that which we could actually do. Sci-fi is that which we're probably not going to see.