 But I think, and hope, that the novels can be understood and enjoyed as science fiction, on their own terms. |
| 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. |
| No one inspired me to write, but writer Harlan Ellison terrified me into getting published. |
| 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. |
| It started 25 years ago, when I was teaching elementary school in a small town in Missouri. |
| But it's not just a game of finding literary references. |
| It's one of the strangest attributes of this profession that when we writers get exhausted writing one thing, we relax by writing another. |
| 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. |
| I loved almost everything about being a teacher, but I was an unusual teacher. |
| The truth is, it's not a great career move to create a readership and then, in effect, abandon them. |
| It's odd how violence and humor so often go together, isn't it? |
| 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. |
