The science of booby-trapping has taken a good deal of the fun out of following hot on the enemy's heels.

Evolutionary naturalism takes the inherent limitations of science and turns them into a devastating philosophical weapon: because science is our only real way of knowing anything what science cannot know cannot be real.

I told my father I had to try political science for a year. He thought I was throwing my life away.

We sat around on a hotel balcony with a bottle of wine and tried to figure out how you would go about blowing up a planet. That's the kind of conversations science fiction writers have when they get together. We don't talk about football or anything like that.

Growing up in the '70s and '80s science fiction and especially fantasy had such a stigma attached to them. I felt so punished and exiled for being devoted to these things.

The march of science and technology does not imply growing intellectual complexity in the lives of most people. It often means the opposite.

I was always depressed growing up. There wasn't a reason for it I just was. I was sad and morose. I cried a lot I wrote a lot and I read a lot and that was how I dealt with it.

What's sad is that there is an addictive quality to that to believing your own hype to allowing yourself to become validated by others and no longer by yourself. That's the danger of celebrity.

Women are reputed never to be disgusted. The sad fact is that they often are but not with men following the lead of men they are most often disgusted with themselves.

You get used to sadness growing up in the mountains I guess.