The problem with surviving was that you ended up with the ghosts of everyone you’d ever left behind riding on your shoulders.

Sex and hypocrisy. They go together like coffee and cream.

When I read, I'm either reading to learn, or I'm reading to switch off.

Don't tell me about worth," Nita said. "My father commands fleets." "The wealthy measure everything with the weight of their money." Tool leaned close. "Sadna once risked herself and the rest of her crew to help me escape from an oil fire... Your father commands fleets. And thousands of half-men, I am sure. But would he risk himself to save a single one?

The main reason I want someone to read a story of mine is so they can enjoy it and feel like they got something interesting out of it.

If I cared for human approval, I would have been dead long ago.

At some point, you realize you can't provide a perfectly monolithic description of a foreign culture's future any more than you can provide a monolithic description of your own hometown's future. Your choices about what to emphasize and what to leave out make all the difference, and ultimately, your fingerprints and biases and viewpoints are going to be all over the story.