Excellence is being thwarted not only by laziness but by reckless attachment to causes, programs, and - in some cases, leaders.
Science fiction tends to be philosophy for stupid people.
Art and love are the same thing: It’s the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you.
It's peculiar what you remember when you're not trying.
What's hard to do is describe why you like something. Because ultimately, the reason things move people is very amorphous. You can be cerebral about things you hate, but most of the things you like tend to be very emotive. It's really hard to do a literary reproduction of what makes you happy. That's what I try to do. If nothing else, it seems like there's enough people out there telling the world what isn't cool, or what's terrible, or what's depressing. I think there's an element of cynicism in my writing, but I'm an optimistic cynic.
I really hate being sick. It seems inevitable that at one point, one of these predicted epidemics is going to be real. So often they come up, and there's people like me that are freaked out, and the majority of people are just like, "You're being idiots, this happens every other year. "
I get enjoyment out of writing, but I get absolutely no enjoyment out of rewriting, so I don't do much of it. The more you work on something, certainly, the better it gets. But there's also a pretty clear law of diminishing returns. It drives me crazy to do readings of my books, because if I read anything I've written in the past, I'd like to almost rewrite everything.
Today the United States has admitted that after months and months of searching, we still have no idea where Osama bin Laden is. Osama bin Laden? We can't even find Kenneth Lay.
If you never condemned you would never need to forgive.
The surest mark of a Christian is not faith, or even love, but joy.
Last four months were great for me, was probably one of the best four months of my career, playing unbelievable in the clay court season.