I was encouraged to be imaginative and read, and it was a great childhood for a budding writer because I had the time and the freedom to go into a world of my own.
I've been in this business for a long time, and I no longer think that anything that I do by way of clarification is ever going to eradicate the mistakes.
One of the things that frequently gets lost in descriptions of depression is that the depressed person often knows that it is a ludicrous condition to feel so disabled by the ordinary business of quotidian life.
To him that waits all things reveal themselves, provided that he has the courage not to deny, in the darkness, what he has seen in the light.
I'm fascinated how often and with what whole-heartedness people will risk their lives to perform acts of courage, sacrifice, and compassion for total strangers.
Darwin gives courage to the rest of science that we shall end up understanding literally everything, springing from almost nothing - a thought extremely hard to comprehend and believe.
They say change gets more difficult as we get older - each year we're more stuck in our ways, more reluctant to learn something new.
You want to balance the budget in this country? We change the salary structure for Congress and the President. Every year they don't balance the budget, we don't pay them.
I think the class divide is going to change. I think a lot more working class people are going to get published. It is really class ridden, literature.
For a lot of people, becoming an author is a change in occupation... they are coming from something that totally has nothing to do with this. If they are expecting to come into a room full of people praising them, then they are in the wrong place.
I'd rather excite the imagination of a legion of readers and make pennies from each of them than hold off for a larger chunk of change from only a handful of fans.
One of the enduring myths of campaign analysis is that you can actually count the number of 'undecided' voters by asking voters if they are undecided or not. Sometimes, significant numbers of voters actually change their minds.
It's one thing to reject the idea that it's a man's job to bring home all the bacon; it's another the 500th time your wife reaches for the check at dinner.
My writing has to support more than my research habit, but I love to curl up with a book about some dusty corner of history.
The impact of the magazine was very strong. As I said, it portrayed dinosaurs as part of the geological history, part of the story of life on earth. It struck that paleontology was the career for me.
Kindness and intelligence don't always deliver us from the pitfalls and traps: there are always failures of love, of will, of imagination. There is no way to take the danger out of human relationships.
Generational change within a genre is hard to parse while it's happening. Only in retrospect can the passing of the baton from ancestors to progeny be clearly discerned.
If I could change one thing about myself I'd be less highly strung. I find my sensibility quite high maintenance.
Writers are a product of where we come from, but by looking at alternatives to the culture in which we live, we can find ways to change and hopefully improve it.
With the emergence of civilization, the rate of change shifted from hundreds of thousands of years to millennia. With the emergence of science as a way of knowing the universe, the rate of change shifted to centuries.
I think that the core doctrines of Christianity - the incarnation, the resurrection, life after death-these are as strong as ever. In fact, the belief in life after death has increased in this century.
