I love almost everything about my work except conferences. I am too shy in front of an audience. But I love signings and having eye contact with a reader who already knows my soul.

I cannot face with comfort the idea of life without work; work and the free play of the imagination are for me the same thing, I take no pleasure in anything else.

I go through periods where I work a great deal at all hours of the day whenever I am around a typewriter, and then I go through spells where I don't do anything. I just sort of have lunch - all day. I never have been able to stick to a schedule. I work when there is something due or when I am really excited about a piece.

I need to feel like the work I'm doing is not necessarily important, but meaningful, at least to me, because otherwise it just becomes a day job. It just becomes factory work and I get really frustrated.

I like the job. That's what I'll miss the most... I'm not sure anybody ever liked this as much as I've liked it.

Our point of view is, lets not be so elitist that we can't honor good, hard, dignified, ennobling work: people working with their hands, building things, putting up solar panels, weatherizing homes, working on organic agriculture, building wind farms. We don't have robots in society, so somebody has to do that work. Lets make sure that the people who can use that work get a chance to do it. I see that as a first step toward bigger and better things.