I think the experience of feeling isolated, of not fitting in, creates the urge to explore.
The best way to write a novel is to do it behind your own back.
Part of the appeal of the fantastic is taking ridiculous ideas very seriously and pretending they're not absurd.
I have danced with the spider. I have cut a caper with the dancing mad god.
For every action, there's an infinity of outcomes. Countless trillions are possible, many milliards are likely, millions might be considered probable, several occur as possibilities to us as observers - and one comes true.
My job is not to try to give readers what they want but to try to make readers want what I give.
I do, however, feel reasonably strongly the sense that the job of a piece of argumentative scholarly non-fiction is not the same as the job of a piece of fiction.
Anyone who, for 25 years, has built a career on such tenuous foundations as a high-pitched giggle, a raspberry and a sprinkling of top 'Cs' needs all the friends he can get.
I realized that my book readings were boring me. I was going to go up there and read a passage and sleepwalk through the whole event and I needed to make it more interesting. I wanted to be running and jumping and do something so that the event would be so exciting. I had to trick myself into having fun every time.
Color must be thought, imagined, dreamed.
Base and crafty cowards are like the arrow that flieth in the dark.