Creativity is a continual surprise.

Mars is empty now. Five hundred years from now, it'll be full of people.

I discovered very early on that if you wanted a thing, you went for it - and you got it. Most people never go anywhere, or want anything - so they never get anything.

...trees to cool the towns in the boiling summer, trees to hold back the winter winds. There were so many things a tree could do: add color, provide shade, drop fruit, or become a children's playground, a whole sky universe to climb and hang from; an architecture of food and pleasure, that was a tree. But most of all the trees would distill an icy air for the lungs, and a gentle rustling for the ear when you lay nights in your snowy bed and were gentled to sleep by the sound.

Recreate the world in your own image and make it better for your having been here.

But you can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them. It can't last.

I did what most writers do at their beginnings: emulated my elders, imitated my peers, thus turning away from any possibility of discovering truths beneath my skin and behind my eye.