It's quite obvious to me that so much of what goes on in the world of science fiction has analogies with a ghetto mentality, with a sense of clannishness and that ambivalence that you have...

In the way book clubs usually operate, you've all read the same book and you've come to talk about it, but of course as you talk about it, you've not read the same book at all; you've sometimes read utterly different books.

I have always used emotion as a writing tool. That goes back to me being on the stage. The thing is, emotion -- if it's visibly felt by the writer -- will go through all the processes it takes to publish a story and still hit the reader right in the gut.

I never started out to be a science fiction writer. I had mainstream ambitions early on, but I never wanted to restrict myself to that, either. I wanted it all.

To me, science fiction does not have anything to do with futurism. It's not about predicting the future; it's about exploring the edge. Everybody lives on the edge of new things happening. Not just now -- this was true 50 years ago, 150 years ago, 250 years ago. Change is the real issue in science fiction.

I'm not a systematic guy. (I hope that can be a strength, but I wish I could do it faster!) I never start out with a set plan, and I never start out with a theme. The theme comes as I go along, and I may not even know what it was until I go back and reread.... If I knew where I was going, I wouldn't be interested in the journey. I write to find out where I'm going.

Science fiction publishing is unquestionably making more money than it ever has in the past. In the context of the lines that publish a lot of science fiction and fantasy and have bestsellers, the bestsellers are bigger than they’ve ever been.

Sleaze appeals innately to something in the human spirit, and it appeals to me just like everybody else. I'm not a 'new man' — that way madness lies, denying your visceral urges. But accepting that your visceral urges aren't the most important thing in the universe seems like a healthy compromise.

I have always said that I would get back to Thomas Covenant eventually. Well, 'eventually' is now. I've had ‘The Last Chronicles’ in my head for more than 20 years -- on the shelf all this time, gathering dust.

A novel is basically a psychological study of human characters, to see inside the character's head in a way you can't do in drama. With science fiction, where you're exploring ideas as much as characters, you have to push the form of the novel to its limits.

The world of the 'Baroque Cycle' happens to be 99% factual history, or as close as I can come to it, but what readers of this kind of fiction are looking for is the ability to become immersed in a different world. That's why there is a big crossover between historical fiction and SF.

Since I had kids, my thinking about things like genetic tinkering with the biosphere and loose federal standards for pollution has really sharpened... Maybe it's not everybody's moral duty to write about the dangers ahead if we keep on going as we are, but it's my moral duty because I feel deeply about it.

There are situations in life where you cannot quite name the experience — you don't have the emotional maturity, or intelligence, or there is no way to name it. You don't know how to describe the situation, so you tell a story around it to bring out that thing you couldn't name before.

I look back at my science fiction and see how it keeps coming back to extropian issues. What makes people people? How far can you push the envelope and still be human?

I don't write in specific genres. It's all a continuum to me. It's all literature, and the literature I happen to like is inherently strange. There are stark and striking images which can only be achieved in science fiction or fantasy...

I write what I define as science fantasy because it allows me to have a foot in both camps, to have my cake and eat it -- the cake being science. Although I have a background in the philosophy of science, I don't have a hard-science background. Science fiction is one of the most philosophical literatures.

I still pay at least some lip service to the idea that new Discworld books should be standalone -- for a given value of 'alone' and a given value of 'stand' -- but we're now more than 30 books in. I’m guided by Star Trek. No one now feels too much of a need to explain what Vulcans are...

Science fiction will never be accepted fully by the mainstream and it shouldn’t be, because if it is, it’s doing something wrong. In commercial fiction, most of what the books are doing is reinforcing your worldview. Science fiction has at its core the scientific process, which is in itself a religion. You have to make a leap of faith in believing that you can understand everything.

Every story presents its own challenges. You have got to find what's unique in the story to make it fresh, to make the reader care about it. Sometimes I'll have a theme in my head or an idea I want to explore. Writers go back to the same tropes again and again. I recognize that I can't escape that completely, but I try to find fresh things with the characters, or imaginative ways of creating the dangers.

A good novel has to involve interesting things happening to interesting people. A lot of books have one or the other, like a fast-moving plot with really flat characters or intensely, thoughtfully observed characters with no verve or drive to the narrative at all. Putting the two together, and in balance, is the challenge.

In The Speed of Dark, the insight was not directly related to parenting an autistic child -- it's trying to step forward and look from the other end. What would it be like to have been that person and be grown? My experience certainly gave me some insight, but if I thought I was writing autobiography I wouldn't be able to do it.

From the very beginning, I’ve been talking about tolerance of the weird, the strange. Callahan’s is a place where no matter how bent you are, as long as there is no malice in you, you’re welcome.

One of my main themes is self-reliance, the ability to compete against odds and to beat them. A lot of kids’ books have somebody who learns to come to terms with some dreadful situation, and it's all about them continuing to suffer at the end of the book. I don’t want to write 'victim' books. I want a triumph, a hero or a heroine, and that’s what I write about.