I was being paid to do what I loved, and there's no gig on earth better than that; it's like a license to steal.

As a young man just beginning to publish some short fiction in the t&a magazines, I was fairly optimistic about my chances of getting published; I knew that I had some game, as the basketball players say these days, and I also felt that time was on my side; sooner or later the best-selling writers of the sixties and seventies would either die or go senile, making room for newcomers like me.

The death of the music business was insane, but audio recordings have been around now for maybe 120 years. Books have been around for, what, nine centuries? So they're more entrenched than music.

The quiet, singing voice of the rose. The song that promised all might be well, all might be well, that all manner of things might be well.

Making people believe the unbelievable is no trick; it's work... Belief and reader absorption come in the details: An overturned tricycle in the gutter of an abandoned neighborhood can stand for everything.

It was the possibility of darkness that made the day seem so bright.

There's a lot of things people think they can't do and then discover they can when they find themselves tight-wired.