"It's very strange writing science fiction in a world that moves as fast as ours does."

"I'm a liberal where children are concerned, a libertarian where adults are concerned - and thinking very seriously about running for the House of Representatives, for whatever that's worth."

"Writers, all the good ones, are Natural Born Liars."

"Actors are good liars; writers are good liars with good memories."

"There's no way for me to know, but my best guess, as it must be for everyone, is that other people are pretty much like me."

"The federal debt in this country is principally of Republican design."

"It's your body and your life and you have an absolute right to do with it as you choose."

"The reason Ronald Reagan gets slammed for having so badly exacerbated the problem of deficit spending is that he so plainly deserves it."

"If there is a substantial difference between a gay couple and a childless heterosexual couple, I'm unable to see it."

"There are, believe it or not, good politicians."

"The welfare system in the United States is vile."

"You want to balance the budget in this country? We change the salary structure for Congress and the President. Every year they don't balance the budget, we don't pay them."

"The universe is not fair and it is never going to be fair."

"We are reinventing the world. We've set the ball spinning with little concern for where and how it's going to stop."

"You can have data without information, but you cannot have information without data."

"The most interesting thing about the idea of money is that it makes it possible to measure something in previous ages we couldn't be sure about, and that something is power."

"There's a flipside to this; if you as an individual have the right to live on your own terms, you must have the right to both succeed and fail on them."

"To write well you must be willing to go naked into the world."

"As a fiscal conservative, I think that our government should pay for itself."

"An attempt to write nothing but characterization will soon bog down; I for one don't want to have somebody tell me about someone else."

"So, we, as human beings, live in a very imprecise world. A world where our perceptions of reality are far more important than actual reality."

"There is virtually nothing I wouldn't be willing to do, to try and make sure that children have a fair shake in life."

"Police do not belong in war zones."

"It's obvious, but perhaps worth saying, that happiness has virtually nothing to do with the state of your intellect."

"Our species is on the verge of changes that will fundamentally alter what it means to be human... and we are the people driving that change."

"Plot and character are virtually the same thing."

"Well, the future of the Internet is... Reality."

"If a liberal political philosophy stands for anything, and I am no longer sure it does, then it must mean that we are committed to the leveling of the playing field for everyone."

"What the power structure is afraid of is that we're going to learn to recognize the truth when we hear it."

"Before Watergate and Viet Nam, the American public, as a whole, believed everything it was told, and since then it doesn't believe anything, and both of those extremes hurt us because they prevent us from recognizing the truth."