“I usually do one con a year as a GoH and try to make the World Fantasy Convention for business purposes.”

I try to challenge myself as much as possible, as often as possible.

Besides the mistakes that are pointed out, I love the way readers become involved with the characters.

Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting.

I write early in the morning, usually after reading portions of at least half a dozen newspapers on the web.

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.

Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.

Sanity lies somewhere between the inhibitions of conventional morality and the looseness of extreme impulse, but the area in-between is very fuzzy.

What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.

I personally prefer freedom of thought. But in England you get neither: you’re ground down by convention. You can’t think as you like and you can’t act as you like. That’s because it’s a democratic nation. I expect America’s worse.

People should think things out fresh and not just accept conventional terms and the conventional way of doing things.

The Buddha’s insight into the middle way is not simply about a balance between extremes. This conventional understanding misses the deeper revelation of the middle way as being the very nature of unexcelled enlightenment.

After four years at the United Nations I sometimes yearn for the peace and tranquility of a political convention.

Lose your schematic conventions by finding some surprising symbol or shape in the welter of shades, and draw that.