Movie SF is, by definition, dumbed down - there have only been three or four SF movies in the history of film that aspire to the complexity of literary SF.

The truth is, it's not a great career move to create a readership and then, in effect, abandon them.

There's a unique bond of trust between readers and authors that I don't believe exists in any other art form; as a reader, I trust a novelist to give me his or her best effort, however flawed.

As for the depiction of the Catholic church, it's not meant to be a prediction.

But it's not just a game of finding literary references.

But I think, and hope, that the novels can be understood and enjoyed as science fiction, on their own terms.

I loved almost everything about being a teacher, but I was an unusual teacher.

Writing, I'm convinced, should be a subversive activity - frowned on by the authorities - and not one cooed over and praised beyond common sense by some teacher.

It started 25 years ago, when I was teaching elementary school in a small town in Missouri.

No one inspired me to write, but writer Harlan Ellison terrified me into getting published.

It's odd how violence and humor so often go together, isn't it?

It's one of the strangest attributes of this profession that when we writers get exhausted writing one thing, we relax by writing another.

Movie SF is, by definition, dumbed down - there have only been three or four SF movies in the history of film that aspire to the complexity of literary SF.

I knew that I wanted to be a writer even before I knew exactly what being a writer entailed.

As long as my sixth graders showed an average improvement of five years, the principal and district pretty much left me alone to create my own curriculum and teach whatever I wanted.

He loved the darkness and mystery of the Catholic service the tall priest strutting like a carrion crow and pronouncing magic in a dead language the immediate magic of the Eucharist bringing the dead back to life so that the faithful could devour Him and become Him the smell of incense and mystical chanting.

Power a currency that never went out of style.

Real life seldom structures a decent denouement.

The Great Change is when humankind accepts its role as part of the natural order of the universe instead of its role as a cancer.

In twentieth century Old Earth a fast food chain took dead cow meat fried it in grease added carcinogens wrapped it in petroleum based foam and sold nine hundred billion units. Human beings. Go figure.

A hero. You want to be one of those rare human beings who make history rather than merely watch it flow around them like water around a rock.

Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become.

The whole planet reeks of mysticism without revelation.

Prison always has been a good place for writers, killing, as it does, the twin demons of mobility and diversion.

Seduction was both a science and art, a blend of skill, discipline, proximity, and opportunity. Mostly proximity.

Those who ignore history's lessons in the ultimate folly of war are forced to do more than relive them, they may be forced to die by them.

The orthogonal features, when combined, can explode into complexity.

The Tax Code today is more complicated than ever, and the very people on the Republican side who denounce the Tax Code's complexity are the ones that put together what they now call a convoluted monstrosity. They put it into effect.

Reduce the complexity of life by eliminating the needless wants of life, and the labors of life reduce themselves.

Armageddon is not around the corner. This is only what the people of violence want us to believe. The complexity and diversity of the world is the hope for the future.

The complexity of the emotional life of the play is what you live to work on.

We need to shift the paradigm from reactive technologies to more integrative solutions that deal with the variety and complexity of the threats that are out there today.

What we call 'evil' doesn't necessarily deserve any kind of respect or understanding, by any means; it just deserves an acknowledgement of its complexity so we can better understand it - so we can help prevent it.

The intellectual evolution of the race consists in an increase in the number, delicacy, complexity, permanence and speed of formation of such associations.

A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.

This growth in the number, speed of formation, permanence, delicacy and complexity of associations possible for an animal reaches its acme in the case of man.

The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity.

Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.

Complexity is one of the great problems in environmental design.

From time immemorial, man has desired to comprehend the complexity of nature in terms of as few elementary concepts as possible.

We are glorious accidents of an unpredictable process with no drive to complexity, not the expected results of evolutionary principles that yearn to produce a creature capable of understanding the mode of its own necessary construction.

We're all complex human beings, and if some of that complexity shows through, I think it's advantageous for the movie.

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

I think complexity is mostly sort of crummy stuff that is there because it's too expensive to change the interface.

I don't really have preferred roles except those with some complexity.

I have been interested in phenomena involving complexity, diversity and evolution since I was a young boy.

In my piano concerto I developed this polyphony to much higher complexity.

My father taught me Basic and rudimentary C, I learned everything else on my own, including studying computational complexity on my own. That's more a function of my age than anything else though - back when I was in school there were hardly any programming classes.

We have a picture for how complexity arises, because if the universe is computationally capable, maybe we shouldn't be so surprised that things are so entirely out of control.