Television reporters aren't really called reporters. They are called researchers. And that's really all they are.

I do novels a bit backward. I look for a situation, a milieu first, and then I wait to see who walks into it.

No machines will ever truly fully figure the brain out, because the brain's performance is constantly altered or else constrained by this inanimate, rogue artifact you can't control, namely, speech.

The 'New York Honk,' as it was called, was the most fashionable accent an American male could have at that time, namely, the spring of 1963. One achieved it by forcing all words out through the nostrils rather than the mouth. It was at once virile... and utterly affected. Nelson Rockefeller had a New York Honk.

The first newspaper I worked on was the 'Springfield Union' in Springfield, Massachusetts. I wrote over a hundred letters to newspapers asking for work and got three responses, two no's.

They were...well, Beautiful People! - not 'students', 'clerks', 'salesgirls', 'executive trainees' - Christ, don't give me your occupation-game labels! We are Beautiful People, ascendant from your robot junkyard.

And - of course! - the Non-people. The whole freaking world was full of people who were bound to tell you they weren't qualified to do this or that but they were determined to go ahead and do just that thing anyway.