I like living in Vancouver .It's more a matter of being a Vancouver loyalist. Harking back to what I said about growing up with the inherent violence in the southern U.S., I'm deeply enamoured of, and entirely used to living in a society with gun laws akin to those of a Scandinavian social democracy .It's a good thing.

I can't imagine writing a book without some strong female characters, unless that was a demand of the setting. I actually tend to suspect that in real life, there have always been very strong female characters, but at certain stages of society, they've been asked to cool it.

The present tense made him nervous.

Enlightenment is "being," and it grows; it's end is serenity.

Fiction is an illusion wrought with many small, conventionally symbolic marks, triggering visions in the minds of others

I can't do fiction unless I visualize what's going on. When I began to write science fiction, one of the things I found lacking in it was visual specificity. It seemed there was a lot of lazy imagining, a lot of shorthand.

I'm a really good eavesdropper. I listen to what people say and remember all the buzzwords.