My favourite all-time work of fiction: Lord of the Rings. My favourite all-time nonfiction book: Guns, Germs, and Steel. Ask me again next week, you'll get a different answer.

One mind can think only of its own questions; it rarely surprises itself.

Isn't it possible, he wondered, for one person to love another without trying to own each other? Or is that buried so deep in our genes that we can never get it out? Territoriality. My wife. My friend. My lover. My outrageous and annoying computer personality who's about to be shut off at the behest of a half-crazy girl with OCD on a planet that I never heard of and how will I live without [her] when she's gone?

From now on the enemy is more clever than you. From now on the enemy is stronger than you. From now on you are always about to lose.

Firequencher raised his hand. "I've been staying out of family conversations. Do I get credit for that?

I am a creature of chemicals.

Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don't see any.