In the culture at large, the war over science fiction's creative validity has been long since won, but guardians at the gates of literature, movies, and TV linger unconvinced, even as other genres fitfully transcend critical perceptions of insubstantiality.

Beautiful actors are learning what beautiful actresses like Charlize Theron discovered a while ago - that they get taken more seriously when they trash the same beauty that got them taken seriously to begin with.

In 1957's 'There's No You,' Sinatra is suspended at the intersection of a loss he can't face and a memory he can't relinquish.

At the age that I was when I stopped reading comics, and with a set of talents that would seem to mark a future comic-book auteur, my son has had only a passing enthusiasm for the medium.

If we could communicate at the speed of thought, we can augment our creativity with the low-level stuff that AI and robots and 3-D printers and fab labs and all that do.

Politics is politics; art is art. If you play a political role, you have to stop being an artist.

I am a morning writer; I am writing at eight-thirty in longhand and I keep at it until twelve-thirty, when I go for a swim. Then I come back, have lunch, and read in the afternoon until I take my walk for the next day's writing.

People are always saying it's the end of the Gutenberg era. More to the point, it's a return to an oral era. The Gutenberg galaxy was about the written word. At its best, the digital era is part of the rediscovery of the oral. At its worst, it's a Kafkaesque victory of the bureaucratic over the imagination.