There's no damn business like show business - you have to smile to keep from throwing up.

Allowing yourself to smile takes 99% of the effort.

In my family as in most middle-class Indian families I knew when I was growing up science and mathematics were held in awe.

The problem with allowing God a role in the history of life is not that science would cease but rather that scientists would have to acknowledge the existence of something important which is outside the boundaries of natural science.

The science of booby-trapping has taken a good deal of the fun out of following hot on the enemy's heels.

Evolutionary naturalism takes the inherent limitations of science and turns them into a devastating philosophical weapon: because science is our only real way of knowing anything what science cannot know cannot be real.

I told my father I had to try political science for a year. He thought I was throwing my life away.

We sat around on a hotel balcony with a bottle of wine and tried to figure out how you would go about blowing up a planet. That's the kind of conversations science fiction writers have when they get together. We don't talk about football or anything like that.

Growing up in the '70s and '80s science fiction and especially fantasy had such a stigma attached to them. I felt so punished and exiled for being devoted to these things.

The march of science and technology does not imply growing intellectual complexity in the lives of most people. It often means the opposite.

I was always depressed growing up. There wasn't a reason for it I just was. I was sad and morose. I cried a lot I wrote a lot and I read a lot and that was how I dealt with it.

What's sad is that there is an addictive quality to that to believing your own hype to allowing yourself to become validated by others and no longer by yourself. That's the danger of celebrity.

Women are reputed never to be disgusted. The sad fact is that they often are but not with men following the lead of men they are most often disgusted with themselves.

You get used to sadness growing up in the mountains I guess.

I get some of my ideas from watching my three daughters but most of them come from my own memories of growing up. I can remember how romantic I was not just about love but romance in the classic sense - the romantic ideals: of honor and truth of loyalty sacrifice and fairness. Those were the elements that made a story satisfying to me.

What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration is nothing other than finding the right road empirically following one's nose taking shortcuts.

The Romantic poets were the prototype ramblers and I've often found myself following in their footsteps - although perhaps not all of their footsteps since a typical walk for Samuel T. Coleridge might last two days and cover 145km.