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.

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

2001: A Space Odyssey was a wonderful conundrum when I was a boy, with its giant concepts thrown across the giant screen at Indian Hills Theater. That movie woke me up in ways that I hadn't imagined, and I went searching for book versions of the same drug.

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

A brilliant mind was never as clever as three average minds sniffing after something of interest.

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

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.