At the ballet, you really feel like you're in the presence of something outside the rest of your life. Higher than the rest of your life.

Everything seems to be going faster and faster. It's really harder to create something that endures. The New York City Ballet has succeeded in doing that.

You have to be an extremely good reader to appreciate what a good writer is. There are some people who are completely insensitive to good writing.

Sometimes during a ballet I'll look around and see all these rows of intent faces, concentrating on this beautiful thing up on the stage.

You can lose a reader in a blink of an eye. If a person is an engineer or chemist or an anthropologist or whatever, you spoil the whole book for that person if there's obviously ignorance here. What's wrong with so much science fiction is that the science is so lousy that it isn't worth paying attention to.

There's a theory, and I think the theory is right, that in order to make a change you've got to make the whole language of the page harmonious. Well, that's a lot easier with a computer.

Power doesn't always corrupt. Power can cleanse. What I believe is always true about power is that power always reveals.