We're all capable of climbing so much higher than we usually permit ourselves to suppose.

People have the right to call themselves whatever they like. That doesn't bother me. It's other people doing the calling that bothers me.

Drowning people Sometimes die Fighting their rescuers.

The child in each of us Knows paradise. Paradise is home. Home as it was Or home as it should have been. Paradise is one's own place, One's own people, One's own world, Knowing and known, Perhaps even Loving and loved. Yet every child Is cast from paradise- Into growth and new community, Into vast, ongoing Change.

Well, writing was what I wanted to do, it was always what I wanted to do. I had novels to write so I wrote them.

I'm a 48-year-old writer who can remember being a 10-year-old writer and who expects someday to be an 80-year-old writer. I'm also comfortably asocial -- a hermit in the middle of Los Angeles -- a pessimist if I'm not careful, a feminist, a Black, a former Baptist, an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive.

I began reading science fiction before I was 12 and started writing science fiction around the same time.