They spent the first three years of school getting you to pretend stuff and then the rest of it marking you down if you did the same thing.

Science fiction is filled with Martians and space travel to other planets, and things like that.

As an artist your first loyalty is to your art. Unless this is the case, you're going to be a second-rate artist. I don't mean there's never any overlap. You learn things in one area and bring them into another area. But giving a speech against racism is not the same as writing a novel. The object is very clear in the fight against racism; you have reasons why you're opposed to it. But when you're writing a novel, you don't want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that. Reality simply consists of different points of view.

I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.

We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.

I used to act in college, but always comedy. Didn't do [William] Shakespeare - did Ben Jonson.

Ordinary, said Aunt Lydia, is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.