Ballet is sort of a mystery to me. And I don't want to unravel that mystery.

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.

I write from seven to about noon. I used to try to write longer, but I read and I found that I was always getting myself tired by working in the afternoon and then I was just throwing out what I wrote in the afternoon, so writing then was counterproductive.

I sometimes feel that if your book sells more than 20 years, then there's something in it that you can say, gee, I did something that endures, that's timeless

The moment the curtain rose on that first ballet, I knew something wonderful and new had come into my life. I can still see the first scene. The ballet was Divertimento No. 15

To my mind, the prose in a non-fiction work that's going to endure has to be of the same quality as the prose in a work of fiction that endures.

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.