Fairy tales lie just as much as statistics do, but sometimes you can find a grain of truth in them.

The hardest thing of all is when pain is hidden behind a mask of calm.

I suppose that literature as it is won't die, science fiction included. But games are becoming an extremely important part of the science fiction world, including games that are adapted from books (or vice versa: books that are adapted from games). It's wonderful to have the opportunity to play and see your favorite characters on the screen, but the opportunity to read a book does not become less attractive.

A car's not the right place for showing off to a girl—the bed's the place for that. The consequences of a mistake there are more upsetting, but less tragic.

Nobody can be forced to commit an act of villainy. You can't push anybody into the mud; people always step into it themselves.

This was how you wound up in the Inquisition. When you stopped being able to see any difference between Light Ones and Dark Ones. When for you, people weren't even a flock of sheep, but just a handful of spiders in a glass jar. When you stopped believing in the future, and all you wanted to do was preserve the status quo. For yourself. For those few individuals who were still dear to you.

A writer who wants to be translated and published abroad faces a very difficult challenge: first of all, he must make sure that his book is cosmopolitan in the best sense of the word, that it is interesting to a global audience. Nobody is going to read about problems that they don’t care about.