Science fiction, in its purest form, for me, it works the best when it's being used as metaphor to look at something from a one-step-removed process, to give a little objectivity and insight into something that, if you were applying it on the face of it, we'd all be too close to.

I'm a guy who never wanted to hold a steady job, because I was worried about the monotony.

When I was in high school, I wrote a play that I sent off to a competition that took second place. I got a check for a hundred dollars. I never cashed it, because obviously it was worth way more than a hundred dollars.

I remember somebody asking me in an interview years ago if I would be interested in playing Jason Bourne. I laughed: I didn't think anybody would want to see me run around with a machine gun. It always stayed in the back of my head that I had reacted like that. It bothered me.

I was an only child with a lot of time to kill. I suspect a lot of writers are only children, or only children become writers because it's a way of being alone.

Choosing to mother your kids full-time may seem to some the easy choice, eschewing as it does the stresses and strains of the workplace, but one of the continuing frustrations for women is the lack of respect they get for taking on the responsibility for domestic life, whether they're also working outside the home or not.

I believe there are three keys to success. For me it is keeping my priorities in order: It's my faith and my family, and then the business.

My family, we're all WASPs.