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

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.

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

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.

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.