“I always felt sorry for the sidekick as a kid. They never got their due and it left a very bad taste in the mouth - they are defined by a subordinate relationship to someone else. I always felt lik...”

“Part of the appeal of the fantastic is taking ridiculous ideas very seriously and pretending they're not absurd.”

“Loads of children read books about dinosaurs, underwater monsters, dragons, witches, aliens, and robots. Essentially, the people who read SF, fantasy and horror haven't grown out of enjoying the st...”

“I just can't get with this idea that literature is a 12-step program. If someone wants to read a book to see good people get rewarded and the bad people get punished, essentially what they want is ...”

“I think it's important to remember that writers do not have a monopoly of wisdom on their books. They can be wrong about their own books, they can often learn about their own books”

“There’s a big default notion that “spare,” or “precise” prose is somehow better. I keep insisting to them that while such prose is completely legitimate, it’s in no way intrinsically more accurate,...”

“The first thing you have to learn when you go into the arts is to learn to cope with rejection. If you cant, youre dead”

“When I am grown up I shall carry a notebooka fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases.”

“Love the work: the grind, the dreaming, the distracted not-sleep, all of it. Its the one thing in the job that will always be there, and the real pleasure in the profession. Everything else is luck.”