I've taught Sunday school, I've sung in the choir, I directed a choir.

You can also make explicit certain social problems which, again, would be prejudged or not encountered at all in real life, because people have set up defenses against it. Fantasy allows you to get past defenses.

I love biomedical science, I love astronomy, and you can't really do much with those in a fantasy setting.

One of my degrees was a science degree in biology.

I was writing fiction, but not finishing fiction.

I had, of course, no model for that sort of woman being married, but I can make that up as I go along.

But in fantasy, you can make a complete break, and you can put people in a situation where they are confronted with things that they would not confront in the real world.

Now my mother, interestingly enough, was not a feminist in her own mind.

Having a mother who had been an aeronautical engineer convinced me that more things should be open to women.

I like the Beatles, of course, but that's when I grew up.

In a novel, I could submerge my ego in a character's and let his perceptions take over.

I can become very emotional about math, although I'm not that good at it.

Hard to be a physics major at Rice University if you have flunked calculus.

I actually feel that the different kinds of stories come out of different parts of my brain.

When I was quite young, she was working in a hardware store, so I grew up knowing about hardware.

I've taught Sunday school, I've sung in the choir, I directed a choir.

When I was starting out, I did not do short fiction well, because I kept wanting to write books.

Other people, including me, have written books with main characters who were old and rich. Or old and brilliant. Old sages, old wizards, old rich people.

No, but a cello is the perfect string bass for an accordion. Works with it beautifully.

There are relatively few science fiction or fantasy books with the main character being an old person.

When a person responds emotionally to intellectual things, or emotionally only to traditional emotional things - I find that an interesting break between myself and some other writers and fans.

It may be far in the future, but there's some kind of logical way to get from where we are to where the science fiction is.

So when I got out of the military, I went back to school in biology, and earned a biology degree at the University of Texas, and then did some graduate work in it.

It's hard to hold the focus that strongly on a single character for that long.

My personal feeling about science fiction is that it's always in some way connected to the real world, to our everyday world.

I used to not back down from a challenge.

I regarded drugs as somewhat like rattlesnakes - it's possible to pick one up without getting bit, but why bother?

My first degree came years before my second. I had wanted to be a physicist, but I flunked calculus.

No but a cello is the perfect string bass for an accordion. Works with it beautifully.

Fantasy allows you to get past defenses.

But in fantasy you can make a complete break and you can put people in a situation where they are confronted with things that they would not confront in the real world.

I didn't have a boyfriend until I was 17. There were boys at school that I would find out later had a crush on me but I was too shy to talk to them.

I'm thinking of going to programming school. Learn how to sit down at any computer and learn to do anything on it. That's all I have left and have interest in.

I went to elementary school in Ottawa, and then to a private secondary school.

People react to fear, not love; they don't teach that in Sunday School, but it's true.

For example, UNICEF works with governments to change legislation such as in India where a law was passed raising the age of compulsory school completion to keep children in school and away from the workplace for longer.

In 1975 I decided that there was no future in flying (airline jobs were impossible to get, and who wants a job where you are judged only by seniority?) and headed off to grad school.

Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college.

My grandmother was a teacher, my sister was a teacher, my daughter was a teacher and is now a superintendent in northern California, and my son-in-law is a high school principal. I am surrounded.

A drunkard would not give money to sober people. He said they would only eat it, and buy clothes and send their children to school with it.

A good dancer is an educated one, so don't abandon school.

In high school and college all my friends and my brother wrestled.

I was an elementary school teacher.

I would not be gotten into a schoolhouse until I was eight years old. Nor did I accomplish much after I started. I doubt if I had gone to school six months in all when my father died. I was fourteen at the time.

And I began to tell little anecdotes that had happened to me, and people would laugh. And I began to like that, you know. But I knew that, 'cause I'd do that in school, but I wouldn't do it out there in front of all them people.

I was dyslexic, I had no understanding of schoolwork whatsoever. I certainly would have failed IQ tests. And it was one of the reasons I left school when I was 15 years old. And if I - if I'm not interested in something, I don't grasp it.

I don't make my own schedule - it's constructed around my sons' school schedules.

Right out of high school I never had the fear of getting beat, which is how most people lose.

The Professional Children's School, it's for professional kids, so if you wanted to ditch, you could just write, Audition on a note and leave. I didn't really like school all that much.