We are born by accident into a purely random universe.

It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree’s writing. I don’t think the novels of Jane Austen could have been written by a man nor the stories of Ernest Hemingway by a woman, and in the same way I believe the author of the James Tiptree stories is male.

I find the world and all it contains extremely fascinating. Is this sinful?

Autobiography. Apparently one should not name the names of those one has been to bed with, or give explicit figures on the amount of money one has earned, those being the two data most eagerly sought by readers; all the rest is legitimate to reveal.

There are true unseen forces, but not nearly so many as we believe, nor would they rule us so sternly if we did not admit them to our souls. We would not be assailed half so often by devils, had we not taken the trouble to invent so many of them.

Unacceptable, maybe. But not unthinkable. Nothing's unthinkable once somebody's thought it.

Who could not return from a visit to Jack Vance's world, without feeling that he had been somewhere unique, that he had experienced things unavailable in our mundane world?