Science fiction is really a rather tiny business compared with its giant cousin, which is fantasy.

I've always thought of science fiction as being, at some level, a 19th-century business.

I wrote when I was a young teen, but I didn't put an eye on the available markets until I was seventeen. The next ten years felt like a self-centered experiment in personal abuse.

Before I was reading science fiction, I read Hemingway. Farewell to Arms was my first adult novel that said not everything ends well. It was one of those times where reading has meant a great deal to me, in terms of my development - an insight came from that book.

A community that learns together excels together. We need to form communities that learn together.

It has often been said that [...] the Japanese [are] geniuses at taking foreign ideas and adding a unique finishing touch.

This is a slow business to have success in. There are exceptions, but for the most part it's kind of like the last writer standing.... I've got gray. I've got plenty of gray. I'm creating a career slowly, like a coral reef.

The burden of intelligence: you can always imagine all those wonderful places where you can never belong.

I'm astonished how little fright I have of my own imagination. It really does baffle me that I don't get more scared because I'm capable of thinking up things that are so awful. On any given day I can imagine the worst.

How could anyone survive even a single day, if he didn't feel as if he was, in some little great way, needed?

I don't believe people let things slide away. It's the nature of the universe that everything dissolves into oblivion and by every route possible, but human beings invest a lot of cleverness trying to cling to past events, real or imagined. And because we can't succeed, we get angry and frustrated and feel guilty. Except the Buddhists.

Occasionally, I'll dream I'm in the factory. That will help me write. Not creatively, but more like a prod. I don't want to go back there.