Having been brought up among the biologists and having followed various debates about ways to improve the human template and other debates about the true nature of our nature, I began seriously to wonder: What if? We hold in our hands a tool that is more powerful - for good or ill - than any we have wielded before.

The sands of time are quicksands ... so much can sink into them without a trace.

Even an obvious fabrication is some comfort when you have few others.

I myself have 12 hats and each one represents a different personality. Why just be yourself.

Teaching other people to write is not something I can do. The only kind of advice I can give them will be trite by its nature. Of course, read a lot, write a lot. The kind of advice I wish I had been given is all of a practical nature, having to do with publishers and agents.

I did ... learn an important distinction in graduate school: a speculation about who had syphilis when is gossip if it's about your friends, a plot element if it's about a character in a novel, and scholarship if it's about John Keats.

Everyone thinks writers must know more about the inside of the human head, but that's wrong. They know less, that's why they write. Trying to find out what everyone else takes for granted.