The many magazines, ranging from pulp to slick, that used to serve as both farm teams for writers and lures to readers, with hundreds of short stories every month, don't exist. Most of the doors for new people have been sealed.

Nothing about it interested me. Or about anything else, except making up stories. If literacy weren't so nearly universal, God knows what I'd be. A drain on the State, I shouldn't wonder.

I love Hammett, never liked Chandler - I'm one of the few.

A guy named Peter Rabe wrote a batch of books for Gold Medal in the '50s, and he was absolutely the single largest influence on writing style. I was completely in love with the way the man wrote.

I'm interested in using evolution to move forward into the future, to get biology to do a lot of new chemistry for us.

If a State has reliable scientific information that demonstrates that a warning is needed for a particular food, then in the interest of public health, it should share that information with the FDA and petition for a new national standard.

I would say keep supporting space flight, keep telling the public and the politicians why it's important to advance science and explore the galaxy. I encourage the Japanese to keep doing what they're doing.

The discovery of the habit loop is important because it reveals a basic truth: When a habit emerges, the brain stops fully participating in decision making. It stops working so hard, or diverts focus to other tasks.