Writer Quotes

I've had horror movies thrown at me and I just don't want to do any because violence isn't really good for society.

I'm one of the guys who wants to watch the film completely done, with special effects, sound and music, because I tend to get disappointed if I watch it not fully done.

I'm not jumping into anything fast. I'm an actor that likes to choose my work and there's an element of good taste to my work.

I teethed on books of heroes such as Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln and King David.

I now attend non-orthodox synagogues, and study little during the secular week.

I loved history, particularly of the British, American and Old Testament kind.

I learned from my Adventist upbringing that the biggest sins were sexual.

I knew in my gut that there was something wrong with a system that couldn't fire its incompetents, and I had my share of incompetent college teachers.

I have decided to follow in my sinful ways, and have largely abandoned the increasingly religious life I was leading over the previous months, including several hours of Talmudic study a day.

At times during high school and college I wished to be a sportswriter.

At the time I perceived most religious men, particularly the pastors with all their talk about love, faith and relationship, as effeminate.

I did not want to reject religion as nonsense because life seemed to have no ultimate purpose without it, and most of the good people I knew were Christians.

I believed that English-speaking people had a divine mission to civilize the world by making it western, democratic and Christian.

I decided to take God and organized religion seriously, and to reject the secular life which in my teens had looked attractive because it allowed me to act in any way that I wanted.

The Seventh Day Adventist Church believes that it was specially chosen by God to prepare the world for the Second Coming of His Son Jesus.

Everything we do affects other people.

Acting in anger and hatred throughout my life, I frequently precipitated what I feared most, the loss of friendships and the need to rely upon the very people I'd abused.

Well, it's an adventure story, and a Bildungsroman, of course, but there was also the intention to describe a culture that had been seen in rather narrow terms.

We're not lost. We're locationally challenged.

There are readers who want every point to be clearly and unambiguously set forth, and there are those who want to pry ideas and meanings out for themselves.

There are people who believe in an absolutely transparent prose; with every respect for clarity of expression, I don't.

The people who don't like it tend to dislike it intensely. That's unfortunate, but not surprising when one deliberately goes against audience expectations.

The language fictional characters use is chosen for effect, at least if the author is concentrating.

The ideal, it seems to me, is to show things happening and allow the reader to decide what they mean.

The cynical part of the answer is that I expect to see a good deal more space opera, set far enough in the future as to be disconnected from contemporary issues.

Sometimes the reader will decide something else than the author's intent; this is certainly true of attempts to empirically decipher reality.

People tell me they laughed hard enough to wake their spouses, that they've given away numerous copies to friends, and that it's the one Trek book they'll give to people they wouldn't expect to like others.

Naturally, the reader has access only to the events I show and the way I show them, but as has been said, there's generally a good deal of ambiguity in that presentation.

If I were to write Web now, it would be a much, much darker book.

I'm very happy that the New York Times has spoken well of my stuff; who wouldn't be? But it's not a choice I made.