Sooner or later, I hate to break it to you, you're gonna die, so how do you fill in the space between here and there? It's yours. Seize your space.

Science and fiction both begin with similar questions: What if? Why? How does it all work? But they focus on different areas of life on earth.

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

Maybe sadness was a kind of hunger, she thought. Maybe the two went together.

Children were vehicles for passing things along. These things could be kingdoms, rich wedding gifts, stories, grudges, blood feuds. Through children, alliances were forged; through children, wrongs were avenged. To have a child was to set loose a force in the world.

Screw poetry, it’s you I want, your taste, rain on you, mouth on your skin.

I'm not interested in cutting the feet off my characters or stretching them to make them fit my certain political view.