To improve as a player you need to not only know how you plan to win, but ... how might your opponent disrupt your plan.

It has often been said that [...] the Japanese [are] geniuses at taking foreign ideas and adding a unique finishing touch.

I don't believe people let things slide away. It's the nature of the universe that everything dissolves into oblivion and by every route possible, but human beings invest a lot of cleverness trying to cling to past events, real or imagined. And because we can't succeed, we get angry and frustrated and feel guilty. Except the Buddhists.

A community that learns together excels together. We need to form communities that learn together.

Before I was reading science fiction, I read Hemingway. Farewell to Arms was my first adult novel that said not everything ends well. It was one of those times where reading has meant a great deal to me, in terms of my development - an insight came from that book.

I'm astonished how little fright I have of my own imagination. It really does baffle me that I don't get more scared because I'm capable of thinking up things that are so awful. On any given day I can imagine the worst.

I've always thought of science fiction as being, at some level, a 19th-century business.