Being smart as a whip includes knowing when not to crack it.

My brand of fantasy is completely devoid of the traditional notions of magic as ritual. Instead I see the fantastic as a meta-layer of existence beyond the real world.

A great ancient poet was blind. A great classical composer was deaf. Many of us are dumb. What have we to show for it?

In Lords of Rainbow I start out by taking away color from the world, and in the process show color's vital place in our lives. At least I hope that by the end of the book it's a portion of what the reader comes away with - a sense of how much color perception enriches our lives and how its lack can make our sensory experience incomplete.

A choir is made up of many voices, including yours and mine. If one by one all go silent then all that will be left are the soloists. Don’t let a loud few determine the nature of the sound. It makes for poor harmony and diminishes the song.

I was nurtured on Greek Mythology and the classical epics. I lived and breathed Homer. Other mythologies - the Russian, the Norse, the Persian, the Indian, Egyptian, etc. - all came later. First and foremost were the Greeks, and they were all living in my head as though I were Zeus and they were a clamoring Chorus of Athenas.

The nutcracker sits under the holiday tree, a guardian of childhood stories. Feed him walnuts and he will crack open a tale.