I want a platform that, like a book or a magazine, I can carry into the bath or leave at the beach.

The big battle at the end of DW isn't drawn from history, but it's influenced by history, certainly.

I've learned that I get blocked when my subconscious mind is telling me that I've taken the work in a wrong direction, and that once I start listening to what my subconscious is trying to tell me, I can work out the problem and get moving again.

For every SF reader of that period, Robert A. Heinlein was also a touchstone.

How long it takes to write a book depends on its length.

It's a tough job to tell a story when the audience already knows the ending, and the ending is bleak.

I was pretty much grown-up by the time I attended school in Britain - or as grown-up as I'll ever get.

Being a writer was never a choice, it was an irresistible compulsion.

The Internet offers an interesting combination of advertising and community by participating in the community you can become an advertisement for yourself.

Working within the limitations of the shared world generally made the writing easier, because I didn't have to invent any of the characters or background, which is usually the hardest part.

When state and religion are one, religion becomes a means for the powerful to remain in power.

It's hard to generalize, because they're all different. When I started, I decided to take as much advantage as I could of the freedom offered by the SF field.

The mass-market paperback, for one, is too expensive.

I went to college, though I didn't take many writing courses.

I've experienced writer's block, but never for more than a few days.

I found college useful for a lot of other reasons. It exposed me to a great many influences I wouldn't otherwise have encountered, and gave me a lot of time with some very intelligent people whose thoughts are still with me.

Everything that you read is an influence on everything you write, and you want to draw as many elements into your work as you can.

Now I have to motivate myself much more than I had previously.

That's why editors and publishers will never be obsolete: a reader wants someone with taste and authority to point them in the direction of the good stuff, and to keep the awful stuff away from their door.

I wanted to be an author for as long as I can remember.

Even if you only want to write science fiction, you should also read mysteries, poetry, mainstream literature, history, biography, philosophy, and science.

If you can find collaborators whose strengths compliment your own, the result can be more than the sum of its authors.

I'm not afraid of werewolves or vampires or haunted hotels, I'm afraid of what real human beings to do other real human beings.

Try to meet as many authors, agents, and editors as you can.

An SF author who reads only SF will have little new to contribute, but someone with a broader experience will bring more to the table.

I want a platform that, like a book or a magazine, I can carry into the bath or leave at the beach.

I now have to find a reason to write, every single day.

I'm in favor of any technology that makes my work available to the reading public at a reasonable price.

The Rift, which was well over a thousand pages of manuscript, took two years.

I can't speak for the other authors, but what I hoped to achieve was to illuminate certain corners of the Lucas universe that hadn't yet been explored.

Genre labels are useful only insofar as they help you find an audience.

Science fiction readers probably have the gene for novelty, and seem to enjoy a cascade of invention as much as a writer enjoys providing one.

Some of my ideas were shot down by Lucasfilm because they stepped on territory that has been reserved for the movies. I didn't have a problem with that.

When you left on Saturday, I felt a horrible void, I saw you everywhere, on the beach, in your room, in the garden: impossible for me to get used to the idea that you had left.

Of course The Beach Boys will be camp.

Babies don't need a vacation, but I still see them at the beach... it pisses me off! I'll go over to a little baby and say 'What are you doing here? You haven't worked a day in your life!'

It sounds ideal, a sort of beach childhood. But it wasn't really. I didn't use the beach very much at all.

I like to cook, walk on the beach, go to concerts and look at fine art.

It was like in Samoa when they'd put up a movie screen on the beach and show movies and the locals would run behind the sheet to see where the people went. It was pretty grim.

I've never been one to run around in Speedos on the beach.

You know, The Beach Boys' image is kinda like a group Doris Day, you know what I mean?

The pictures we saw before we got down here didn't even touch the reality of what it is like being here. We can be right on the beach with all the devastation and still not be able to imagine what it was like when the wall of water actually came up.

I've been kind of submerged in my own little geographic location for a really long time in Venice Beach.

We filmed one scene on the beach and there was definitely weird energy around, and we were followed around by a white owl to several different locations, and little things like that, or certain mishaps would happen and you'd have to wonder what that was about.

The British are so funny. It's like they can't believe I lived in Hackney. 'You could live in Bondi Beach. Why would you want to live in 'Ackney?' But Hackney's fantastic. I'm serious. There are so many artists there. I loved the markets, the parks, the pubs, the diversity. It was a cultural melting-pot.

I rent houses in LA when I'm filming. I find the isolation there terrifying. There's nowhere to go, there's nowhere to be with people. I'm not a beach bunny.

One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach. One can collect only a few, and they are more beautiful if they are few.

The moon is essentially gray, no color. It looks like plaster of Paris, like dirty beach sand with lots of footprints in it.

And I was in another band called Flash In The Pan, which was soca, Latin music, down in Laguna Beach.