I live for those rare and delicious moments when the words on the page take off and I am the bystander, watching as the tale shows me what will happen next.

The burden of intelligence: you can always imagine all those wonderful places where you can never belong.

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 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.

Occasionally, I'll dream I'm in the factory. That will help me write. Not creatively, but more like a prod. I don't want to go back there.

I wrote when I was a young teen, but I didn't put an eye on the available markets until I was seventeen. The next ten years felt like a self-centered experiment in personal abuse.

I'm the only member of SFWA in Nebraska, but I don't pine away for the companionship of other science fiction writers. I [go] to very few conventions. I'm quite willing to be that eccentric who has a very odd job, quite happy to be the only science fiction writer in town.