“That means there’s also more bad SF available. Whether there is also more good is a matter for future historians of the field.”

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.

Getting from page four to page five is more important than spending three weeks getting page four perfect.

There’s certainly more new SF available than when I started writing.

If the historian will be faithful to the photograph, the photograph will be faithful to history.

The historian records, but the novelist creates.

John Lewis Gaddis is not only the favorite historian of the Reagan administration, but he’s regarded as the dean of Cold War scholarship.

And one of the historian’s jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be… even on the Holocaust.

An historian without political passions is as rare as a wasp without a sting.

Every real poem is the breaking of an existing silence, and the first question we might ask any poem is, What kind of voice is breaking silence, and what kind of silence is being broken?

Ultimately a historian has to put together a cohesive work.

Newt Gingrich seldom misses a chance to note that he is a historian.