Novels for me are how I find out what's going on in my own head. And so that's a really useful and indeed critical thing to do when you do as many of these other things as I do.

It's part of a cycle of stories I'm writing where I deconstruct classic science fiction.

My feelings towards Scott Card are pretty mixed. Politically, he and I are pretty far apart.

I had this really great amazing thing happen where I almost finished the book and I really needed to come up with an ending and I decided to go back and re-read the book and see if I could come up with an ending.

The accolade of your peers is very exciting, always. There's lots of good stuff on the ballot.

It's weirder and more surprising than the other books. I think there are more places where it's just more reality bending, deliberately so. I think it's a lot more emotionally raw.

Novels for me are how I find out what's going on in my own head. And so that's a really useful and indeed critical thing to do when you do as many of these other things as I do.

I think that this misses out on some of the interesting narrative realities, which is that it actually doesn't work very well, that eliminating diversity is actually a really good way to make a species and its individuals less robust.

It's a story of little girls who are pressed into working in sweat shops in games, who spend all day doing repetitive grinding tasks like making shirts, which are then converted into gold and sold on eBay.

The other one I did was "I, Robot." I take apart Isaac Asimov's Robots world.

I just sit down and the page just comes out and I look at it and the elements that appear on that page have a lot to do with what's going on in my life.

It's hard not to like Asimov; he's a really likable guy.

Well, I don't know. It's long, it's longer than both of the other books put together, so it's more ambitious. I think I get under the skin of the people a lot more than in the other books.

Put simply, I want to treat my readers as partners and not crooks. There is no future in calling your most active promoters crooks.

The other one I did was 'I, Robot.' I take apart Isaac Asimov's Robots world.

Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.

Disney is a delight someone who... sweeps those around him along on his dream.

Engineers are all basically high functioning autistics who have no idea how normal people do stuff.

Like all security, privacy is hard.

All secrets become deep. All secrets become dark. That's in the nature of secrets.

I think that Utopia is a theory of human action...

I've always been pretty nomadic.

Life, it is true, can be grasped in all its confused futility merely by opening one's eyes and sitting passively, a spectator on the stands of history - but to understand the social processes and conflicts, the interplay between individual and group, even the physicality of human experience, we have need of small-scale models.

The criminal is the creative artist the detective only the critic.

Exams test your memory life tests your learning others will test your patience.

Trust in him at all times, you people; pour out your hearts to him, for God is our refuge.

I'm their sole parent, and there is nothing more important than being the best father I can be.

Didn't you know I'm going to be the greatest, most entertaining author and artist in the world? Well, don't feel badly, I didn't either!

I don't care why they love me, as long as they love me. I think people respect me because they feel like - I'm kind of like Christmas. I come back every year. You can't get rid of me. I just keep coming back.

Wine is just a conversation waiting to happen.

There's always something suspect about an intellectual on the winning side.

The greatest thing youll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.

I tour with a piano, actually. Luckily I am able to hire people that deal with it completely and magically a piano appears on stage and then magically disappears when I leave.

The difference between movies and TV is that in TV you have to have a trauma every week, but that event may not be the biggest event in the characters' lives.

They don't want to be reminded that there is an authority higher than the authority of the state.

You know you're old when you've lost all your marvels.

It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.

A woman's life is not perfect or whole till she has added herself to a husband. Nor is a man's life perfect or whole till he has added to himself a wife.

New Agers have always told us that we create our own realities. Mind over matter.

My voice is my improvisational instrument, the melody instrument. The guitar is harmonic structure. I'm not a good enough guitarist to improvise on it.

To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational. The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like.

The money that we make from the company goes into The Body Shop Foundation, which isn't one of those awful tax shelters like some in America. It just functions to take the money and give it away.

That's been the most exciting part of the show - incorporating the magic and the acrobats and the singing and dancing to make our 'Pippin.'

Initially, before the modern state of Iraq was created, there were three separate provinces here: a Shiite in the south, a largely Sunni one in the middle, and a Kurdish one in the north.

We have to start teaching ourselves not to be afraid.