I started my cooking 'career' aged 15 almost 20 years ago. At the time it was quite a shock suddenly working 75 to 80 hours a week without time to play football or other sports.

I never really participated in specific sports or anything but once I hit 40 I started to get a little bit more active and began swimming more.

Women's sports is still in its infancy. The beginning of women's sports in the United States started in 1972 with the passage of Title 9 for girls to finally get athletic scholarships.

When did I know I had talent? I think it started when I first started playing sports organized sports.

I started imagining this whole different world. It was a society of musicians a family I hoped I could belong to one day.

I started out in engineering. I was a geophysical engineer. Throughout the course of my life I've done a lot of strange jobs and the effect has been to make me think a little more skeptically about our capitalist society.

Most smiles are started by another smile.

I started in this racket in the early '70s and when I was president of the Science Fiction Writers of America of which I was like the sixth president I was the first one nobody ever heard of.

We do a hard fantasy as well as hard science fiction and I think I probably single-handedly recreated military science fiction. It was dead before I started working in it.

When I started in the business there was a thing called adult fantasy but nobody quite knew what it was and most publishers didn't have an adult fantasy list. They had science fiction lists which they stuck a little bit of fantasy into.