“I’d really like to have been Sir Richard Francis Burton, but it’s the wrong century.”

Dawn was written well before 9/11. People speak a lot today about the banality of evil, but not all evil is banal.

So rewriting is hard for me. I mean, I already know the story and would rather read something new.

Advances have fallen, generally, for everything except the biggest potential bestsellers.

I have a bad tendency to get rapidly bored with my own material.

In one book, CACHALOT, just for my own amusement, every character is based directly on someone I have known.

The storm hit with all the fury of a woman who’d been dieting for six months, only to discover she’d gained four pounds.

Enjoying consciousness every now and then for a second or so before splitting up to become bits and pieces of trees and stars and french fries.

Where lies the line between sorcery and science? It is only a matter of terminology, my friend.

I would hope that my characters have become deeper and more rounded personalities.

Growing up, I never gave a thought to being a writer.

Last year I went to a worldcon for the first time in two decades. I may go again this year.

Wider travels have given me considerably greater insight into how cultural differences affect not only people, but politics and art.

The overwhelming triumph of the international multimedia conglomerate has resulted in less diversity within the field and has made it much harder for newer writers not only to break in, but to make any kind of a living while doing so.

Writing allows me the time to travel and see the world, which is what I always wanted to do.

Science-fiction allowed me to go places that were otherwise inaccessible, which is why I started reading it.

I hear entire symphonies, oratorios, in my head, but I can’t write a note.

Thirty centuries of history allow us to look with supreme pity on certain doctrines which are preached beyond the Alps by the descendants of those who were illiterate when Rome had Caesar, Virgil, and Augustus.

My revenge is just begun! I spread it over centuries, and time is on my side.

The future of humanity is uncertain, even in the most prosperous countries, and the quality of life deteriorates; and yet I believe that what is being discovered about the infinitely large and infinitely small is sufficient to absolve this end of the century and millennium.

And yet, unless my senses deceive me, the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere ‘modernity’ cannot kill.

A house cannot be made habitable in a day; and, after all, how few days go to make up a century.

I do not know when, but I know that many have come in this century to develop arts and sciences, sow the seeds of a new culture that will flourish, unexpected, sudden, just when the power is deluded into believing they have won.

For those [observations] that I made in Leipzig in my youth and up to my 21st year, I usually call childish and of doubtful value. Those that I took later until my 28th year [i.e., until 1574] I call juvenile and fairly serviceable.

He means to succeed, and a man who has centuries before him can afford to wait and to go slow.