I want to read about a character doing something fairly quiet where I can picture who the character is, and what their attitude towards the world is - which I'm a lot more interested in than what they do under the pressure of a gunfight.

The only important elements in any society are the artistic and the criminal, because they alone, by questioning the society’s values, can force it to change.

I want to read about a character doing something fairly quiet where I can picture who the character is, and what their attitude towards the world is - which I'm a lot more interested in than what they do under the pressure of a gunfight.

From 1968 on, I was pretty much the black, gay SF writer.

The General Public is a statistical fiction created by a few exceptional men to make the loneliness of being exceptional a little easier to bear.

Linguistics is very much a science. It's a human science, one of the human sciences. And it's one of the more interesting human sciences.

There is a hollow, holey cylinder running from hilt to point in my machete. When I blow across the mouthpiece in the handle, I make music with my blade. When all the holes are covered, the sound is sad, as rough as rough can be and be called smooth. When all the holes are open, the sound pipes about, bringing to the eye flakes of sun on water, crushed metal. There are twenty holes. And since I've been playing music, I've been called all different kinds of fool - more times than Lobey, which is my name.