It's like you said the other day," said Adam. "You grow up readin' about pirates and cowboys and spacemen and stuff, and jus' when you think the world's full of amazin' things, they tell you it's really all dead whales and chopped-down forests and nucular waste hangin' about for millions of years. 'Snot worth growin' up for, if you ask my opinion.

I am not by nature the kind of creator who is transgressive in order to be transgressive.

The really important thing to be was yourself, just as hard as you could.

That doesn't happen," she explained. "Stars fall. They don't go back up again." "You could be the first," he told her.

I started out writing much more science fictiony stuff and writing about science fiction.

There was a table laid with jellies and trifles, with a party hat beside each place, and a birthday cake with seven candles on it in the center of the table. The cake had a book drawn on it, in icing. My mother, who had organized the party, told me that the lady at the bakery said that they had never put a book on a birthday cake before, and that mostly for boys it was footballs or spaceships. I was their first book.

I'm writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale is improving the more I feel like a writer.