"When I was starting out, I did not do short fiction well, because I kept wanting to write books."

"I used to not back down from a challenge."

"Now my mother, interestingly enough, was not a feminist in her own mind."

"Hard to be a physics major at Rice University if you have flunked calculus."

"I regarded drugs as somewhat like rattlesnakes - it's possible to pick one up without getting bit, but why bother?"

"It's hard to hold the focus that strongly on a single character for that long."

"I love biomedical science, I love astronomy, and you can't really do much with those in a fantasy setting."

"So when I got out of the military, I went back to school in biology, and earned a biology degree at the University of Texas, and then did some graduate work in it."

"In a novel, I could submerge my ego in a character's and let his perceptions take over."

"My personal feeling about science fiction is that it's always in some way connected to the real world, to our everyday world."

"My first degree came years before my second. I had wanted to be a physicist, but I flunked calculus."

"When I was quite young, she was working in a hardware store, so I grew up knowing about hardware."

"There are relatively few science fiction or fantasy books with the main character being an old person."

"I've taught Sunday school, I've sung in the choir, I directed a choir."

"I was writing fiction, but not finishing fiction."

"Having a mother who had been an aeronautical engineer convinced me that more things should be open to women."

"One of my degrees was a science degree in biology."

"You can also make explicit certain social problems which, again, would be prejudged or not encountered at all in real life, because people have set up defenses against it. Fantasy allows you to get past defenses."

"When a person responds emotionally to intellectual things, or emotionally only to traditional emotional things - I find that an interesting break between myself and some other writers and fans."

"It may be far in the future, but there's some kind of logical way to get from where we are to where the science fiction is."

"Other people, including me, have written books with main characters who were old and rich. Or old and brilliant. Old sages, old wizards, old rich people."

"I had, of course, no model for that sort of woman being married, but I can make that up as I go along."

"But in fantasy, you can make a complete break, and you can put people in a situation where they are confronted with things that they would not confront in the real world."