We wanted to write the first prequels as a story that anyone could pick up.
The great secret behind classified projects is that most of them are so utterly boring and uninteresting that James Bond wouldn't even take a second look at them.
Sure, President Bush can say that the U.S. government won't fund stem cell research, but believe me, Japan is applauding. Because they will just do it first and get all the patents.
One of my very favorite things to do is to write bad guys. Because I learned that bad guys never think of themselves as the bad guy.
It was like there was a pile of kindling that was in the back of my imagination just waiting there. Once I lit it, it just flared up and I kept getting ideas and ideas.
If you look at the British royal family and take away the scandals and the goofy stuff that's going on, people love to have this king to look up to - the royals are like celebrities.
If you had an alien race that looked like insects, then they would build robots to look like themselves, not to look like people.
I want to make it so that so many things happen... that you didn't expect would happen in this series, that you realize that you have to read every one of them.
I think now I'm up to something like 85 different titles that I've published.
I always had this non-stop drive. I had to keep sending stories out and every once in awhile I'd get something accepted or get the little trickle of positive feedback.
Every spare second I would write, somehow. On my lunch hour, too.
I had a minor in Russian history, and this was at the time when the big Cold War was going on.
I got to spend all of my time every day at work reading and editing papers about cutting-edge technical research and getting paid for it. Then I'd go home at night and turn what I learned into science fiction stories.
I did several interesting jobs, working in restaurants, I worked at a lab rat farm, feeding and watering all these rats. Then I got a full-time job as a technical writer for a large scientific research laboratory.
I think that somebody with the resources and innovation and the idea is going to come out of nowhere and come up with a successful space travel program.
One of the things that was kind of shocking for humans... was to come to terms with was the fact that, hey, we may not be the center of the universe.
My total year's income from working as hard as I possibly could from writing went from like 30 one year to about 70 the next year. And it made me realize that maybe you couldn't really pay the rent that way.
I'm talking to you and it's basically a direct communication, whereas if I'm writing a letter to you and you read the letter, there are like 12 extra deconstruction and reconstruction steps in the communication.
I've had the same, full-time assistant and typist for eight or nine years now. She's read everything I've written, she types everything and does a good job, translates it and makes comments.
I sold my very first novel when I was 24 or 25 years old.
Of course you don't make any noise in space, because there's no air.
Over the years, I've trained myself to speak using the same language I would use if I were typing meaning using full sentences in the way that paragraphs and scenes are arranged.
I mean, I wasn't stupid. I knew we'd make money and sell a lot of Dune books.
There is grand romance in The Lord of the Rings. It's an important part of epic literature.
We sat around on a hotel balcony with a bottle of wine and tried to figure out how you would go about blowing up a planet. That's the kind of conversations science fiction writers have when they get together. We don't talk about football or anything like that.
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