...Landsman doesn't buy that. Bina never stopped wanting to redeem the world. She just let the world she was trying to redeem get smaller and smaller until at one point, it could be bounded in the hat of a hopeless policeman.

When I first decided I wanted to be a writer, when I was 10, 11 years old, the books that I loved obviously and openly fit that description: They came with maps and glossaries and timelines - books like Lord Of The Rings, Dune, The Chronicles Of Narnia. I imagined that's what being a writer was: You invented a world, and you did it in a very detailed way, and you told stories that were set in that world.

Every day is like a kid's drawing, offered to you with a strange mix of ceremoniousness and offhand disregard, yours for the keeping. Some of the days are rich and complicated, others inscrutable, others little more than a stray gray mark on a ragged page. Some you manage to hang on to, though your reasons for doing so are often hard to fathom. But most of them you just ball up and throw away.

The truth of some promises is not as important as whether or not you can believe in them, with all your heart.

Most science fiction seemed to be written for people who already liked science fiction; I wanted to write stories for anyone, anywhere, living at any time in the history of the world.

So it was scary, but that's how it goes. To my great delight, I discovered that it did all belong.

I don’t mean to make a big deal out of sobriety, by the way. Of all the modes of human consciousness available to the modern consumer I consider it to be the most overrated.