I always turn in my books on time, so you can always count on a book coming out when it’s supposed to.
Every spare second I would write, somehow. On my lunch hour, too.
No, no, no – you don’t argue with concepts. You have to claim Dogma, and therefore leave no room for rational thought.
I think that somebody with the resources and innovation and the idea is going to come out of nowhere and come up with a successful space travel program.
Of course you don’t make any noise in space, because there’s no air.
Each book will have a lot of cliffhangers, because I like that.
Do you want Columbus to go across the ocean, or do you want to put a message in a bottle and hope that it lands somewhere? I’d rather have actual people be there. Whether they look like Americans or like the inhabitants of some other country, depends on who has the most drive.
We must think beyond ourselves.
There will come a time of fire and night, when enemies rise and empires fall, when the stars themselves begin to die.
Telling your story out loud is the way human beings communicate. We don’t normally think up words, translate how to spell them and then move our fingers up and down over this randomly arranged set of keys to make the same letters appear on a screen.
In a certain sense, this guy – who is one of the most evil people in the book – he’s not really that bad at running the show, because he knows what he’s doing, he’s smart and he’s got the big picture in mind. He’s like the Godfather.
I wanted the feel in these books to be like an epic fantasy, with kings, queens, dukes and court politics, but of course like what I was explaining before, about making the science make sense, you have to make the politics make sense, too.
Over the years, I’ve trained myself to speak using the same language I would use if I were typing: meaning using full sentences in the way that paragraphs and scenes are arranged.
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.
I’ve had the same, full-time assistant and typist for eight or nine years now. She’s read everything I’ve written, she types everything and does a good job, translates it and makes comments.
If you had an alien race that looked like insects, then they would build robots to look like themselves, not to look like people.
I think now I’m up to something like 85 different titles that I’ve published.
My total year’s income from working as hard as I possibly could from writing went from like $30 one year to about $70 the next year. And it made me realize that maybe you couldn’t really pay the rent that way.
My dad is a bank president and my mom was an accountant and they didn’t think that seeking the life of a freelance writer was very practical, you see. Of course, I was just as determined to do it.
The great secret behind classified projects is that most of them are so utterly boring and uninteresting that James Bond wouldn’t even take a second look at them.