“When you introduce things that most readers have never seen before into a piece of fiction, you have to describe them with as much precision and in as much detail as possible. What you can eliminate from fiction is the description of things that most readers have seen.”

“The only thing that words can do with any real precision or accuracy is hang together. Accuracy of description in language is not possible beyond a certain point: the most faithfully descriptive account of anything will always turn away from what it describes into its own self-contained grammatical fictions of subject and predicate and object.”

“Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.”

“All true readers have a book, a moment when real life is never going to be able to compete with fiction again.”

“One of the things I've always liked about science fiction is the way it makes you think about things, and look at things from angles you'd never have thought about before.”

“I think that it's only natural that readers become writers. You can only learn so much before you have to share it with others.”