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“No music. No rituals. At home I write in my office or on the laptop in the kitchen where our puppy likes to sleep, and I love his company. But I've trained myself to be able to work anywhere, and I write on trains, planes, in automobiles (if I'm not the driver), airports, hotel rooms. I travel often. If I couldn't write wherever I was I would get little done. I also can write in short bursts. Fifteen minutes are enough to move a story forward.”

“I've gotten a little superstitious about listening to music when I write. Once a story is going somewhere, I keep listening to the same music whenever I work on that story. It seems to help me keep in voice, and alternatively, if I need to make some kind of dramatic shift, I'll go and put on something different to shake myself awake...”

“I often use detective elements in my books. I love detective novels. But I also think science fiction and detective stories are very close and friendly genres, which shows in the books by Isaac Asimov, John Brunner, and Glen Cook. However, whilst even a tiny drop of science fiction may harm a detective story, a little detective element benefits science fiction. Such a strange puzzle.”

“A rich man's body is like a premium cotton pillow, white and soft and blank. ''Ours'' is different. My father's spine was a knotted rope, the kind that women use in villages to pull water from wells; the clavicle curved around his neck in high relief, like a dog's collar; cuts and nicks and scars, like little whip marks in his flesh, ran down his chest and waist, reaching down below his hip bones into his buttocks. The story of a poor man's life is written on his body, in a sharp pen.”

“Once, I'd written a Western story, and one of the panels was just a hand holding a six-shooter, and there was a puff of smoke coming out of the barrel, and a straight horizontal line, indicating the trajectory of the bullet. So that page was sent back to me from the Code office, saying that the particular panel was too violent. I asked them what they meant, and they told me--I swear--"The puff of smoke is too big." Well, of course. So I had the artist make the smoke a little smaller, and the youth of America was saved.”

“Some artists, such as Jack Kirby, need no plot at all. I mean I'll just say to Jack, "Let's let the next villain be Dr. Doom" ... or I may not even say that. He may tell me. And then he goes home and does it. He's so good at plots, I'm sure he's a thousand times better than I. He just makes up the plots for these stories. All I do is a little editing ... I may tell him that he's gone too far in one direction or another. Of course, occasionally I'll give him a plot, but we're practically both the writers on the things.”

“Children delight in folk-tale and fairy lore, but the very little child loves best the story which mirrors the familiar. And it is for him, and for the mother who is striving in this age of profusion to guard the innate simplicity of her child's nature, that I have written my little stories.”

“It's can you, Steve Wozniak, design the same computer - maybe it's a Varian 620i - can you design it on paper with fewer chips than last month? Can you design it with 79 chips instead of 80 chips? I had played this game so long that I had all these little tricks in my head that I can't even explain... Nothing was wasted; absolutely zero waste. I told this story recently to the Resource Recovery Association, recycling, and they loved to hear I didn't believe in waste.”

“I have asked a lot of my emotions-one hundred and twenty stories. The price was high, right up with Kipling, because there was one little drop of something, not blood, not a tear, not my seed, but me more intimately than these, in every story, it was the extra I had. Now it has gone and I am just like you now.”

“Among all the complaints you hear these days about the crimes of the media, it seems to me the critics miss the big one. It is that especially TV, but also we of the print press, tend to reduce mess and complexity and ambiguity to a simple story line that doesn't reflect reality so much as it distorts it. ... What bothers me about the journalistic tendency to reduce unmanageable reality to self-contained, movielike little dramas is not just that we falsify when we do this. It is also that we really miss the good story.”

“in reading ... stories, you can be many different people in many different places, doing things you would never have a chance to do in ordinary life. It's amazing that those twenty-six little marks of the alphabet can arrange themselves on the pages of a book and accomplish all that. Readers are lucky - they will never be bored or lonely.”

“I remember my fourth grade teacher reading 'Charlotte's Web' and 'Stuart Little' to us - both, of course, by E. B. White. His stories were genuinely funny, thought provoking and full of irony and charm. He didn't condescend to his readers, which was why I liked his books, and why I wasn't a big reader of other children's' books.”

“I haven't written a novel or something that long, because I really am improvising all along and the story is growing new limbs to do what it needs to do. So there's very little planning. There's a little planning where I say, "Well, it looks like I'm going in this direction, ok, good." But there's very little forethought or intellectual justification: "Oh, look, I'm putting in a theme park because that represents dystopian America!"”