[Emacs] is written in Lisp, which is the only computer language that is beautiful.

I'm strictly a one-project-at-a-time kind of guy. If I came up with a compelling idea for a different book while working on a project, I'd probably abandon the first project and go with the new idea.

What writers of fantasy, science fiction, and much historical fiction do for a living is different from what writers of so-called literary or other kinds of fiction do. The name of the game in F/SF/HF is creating fictional worlds and then telling particular stories set in those worlds. If you're doing it right, then the reader, coming to the end of the story, will say, "Hey, wait a minute, there are so many other stories that could be told in this universe!" And that's how we get the sprawling, coherent fictional universes that fandom is all about.

You should not believe a thing only because you like to believe it. We call that 'Diax's Rake.

I feel that I am entitled to trample all other considerations into the dirt in my pursuit of a satisfying pun.

They knew many things but had no idea why. And strangely this made them more, rather than less, certain that they were right.

I am on an expense account that would blow your mind.