A lot of people... kind of make heroes that are separate from us, people who are, you know, like... John Wayne and Errol Flynn and, you know, Denzel Washington... people who are different, who are larger than life.

I think that computer programming shows in my writing. Often when I write about computer programmers I'll write about the way that they see the world and they structure the world.

I have never thought that I have sacrificed anything being a writer. That might not be true, maybe I have sacrificed something. Maybe I've given something up, but I can't think of it.

... you should wait until the book is finished before making a judgment on its content. By the time you have gone through twenty drafts, the characters may have developed lives of their own, completely separate from the people you based them on in the beginning. And even if someone, at some time, gets upset with your words - so what? Live your life, sing your song. Anyone who loves you will want you to have that.

Comic books were telling me what life was about. This was how I kind of entered life, through fiction.

One wouldn't want to say that what makes a good writer is the number of books that the writer wrote because you could write a whole number of bad books. Books that don't work, mediocre books, or there's a whole bunch of people in the pulp tradition who have done that. They just wrote... and actually they didn't write a whole bunch of books, they just wrote one book many times.

I laugh, that there's a certain kind of cyclical nature to life and that I don't have to worry because whatever isn't there right now, it's coming back again.