To present a whole world that doesn’t exist and make it seem real, we have to more or less pretend we’re polymaths. That’s just the act of all good writing.

I don't have to write about the future. For most people, the present is enough like the future to be pretty scary.

I've been interested in autism since I've known about it, which is more or less since I've been writing.

You must learn to overcome your very natural and appropriate revulsion for your own work.

I don't always like writing, but I very much like having written.

I can't do fiction unless I visualize what's going on. When I began to write science fiction, one of the things I found lacking in it was visual specificity. It seemed there was a lot of lazy imagining, a lot of shorthand.

I started writing short fiction very briefly, as I imagine is the case for some novelists.

I don't begin a novel with a shopping list - the novel becomes my shopping list as I write it.

All we really have when we pretend to write about the future is the moment in which we are writing. That's why every imagined future obsoletes like an ice cream melting on the way back from the corner store.