There are, occasionally, writers who are able to combine both story and style. They are, of course, the best. You get a spectacular view and you also get to look at it from the backseat of a chauffeur-driven Cadillac. In the field of fantasy, those writers able to combine story-as-narration with story-as-style are even rarer. But there are a few...the late Theodore Sturgeon, the early Ray Bradbury...and Richard Christian Matheson. A brilliant chip off the old block.

I hope you liked them, Reader; that they did for you what any good story should do--make you forget the real stuff weighing on your mind for a little while and take you away to a place you've never been. It's the most amiable sort of magic I know.

If you can read in the 21st century you own the world.

Where you think I’m goan?’ ‘Well,’ Eddie said, ‘what was behind Door Number One wasn’t so hot, and what was behind Door Number Two was even worse, so now, instead of quitting like sane people, we’re going to go right on ahead and check out Door Number Three. The way things have been going, I think it’s likely to be something like Godzilla or Ghidra the Three-Headed Monster, but I’m an optimist. I’m still hoping for the stainless steel cookware.

The age of the book is not over. No way... But maybe the age of some books is over. People say to me sometimes 'Steve, are you ever going to write a straight novel, a serious novel' and by that they mean a novel about college professors who are having impotence problems or something like that. And I have to say those things just don't interest me. Why? I don't know. But it took me about twenty years to get over that question, and not be kind of ashamed about what I do, of the books I write.

People can be stunningly unobservant.

Words create sentences; sentences create paragraphs; sometimes paragraphs quicken and begin to breathe.