Hypotyposis is the rhetorical effect by which words succeed in rendering a visual scene.

Show not what has been done, but what can be. How beautiful the world would be if there were a procedure for moving through labyrinths.

To survive, you must tell stories.

The thought that all experience will be lost at the moment of my death makes me feel pain and fear... What a waste, decades spent building up experience, only to throw it all away... We remedy this sadness by working. For example, by writing, painting, or building cities.

Semiotics is a general theory of all existing languages... all forms of communication - visual, tactile, and so on... There is general semiotics, which is a philosophical approach to this field, and then there are many specific semiotics.

How clear everything becomes when you look from the darkness of a dungeon.

Since I became a novelist I have discovered that I am biased. Either I think a new novel is worse than mine and I don’t like it, or I suspect it is better than my novels and I don’t like it.