Nearly all monster stories depend for their success on Jack killing the Giant Beowulf or St. George slaying the Dragon Harry Potter triumphing over the basilisk. That is their inner grammar and the whole shape of the story leads towards it.

I think all those people I did stories about measured their own success by the joy their work was giving them.

I think a big part of our attraction to sport movies are the stories contained within the sports.

I don't necessarily love the sports per se I love the stories behind them. Also in a kind of perverse way I like to study what it does to us why we care so much. It's caring about something that's utterly meaningless.

There are no heroes in most of my stories. I look at our society with a critical eye and find nothing extraordinary in the people I see.

Stories in which the destruction of society occurs are explorations of social fears and issues that filmmakers novelists playwrights painters have been examining for a long time.

Science fiction is no more written for scientists that ghost stories are written for ghosts.

There are so many stories to tell in the worlds of science fiction the worlds of fantasy and horror that to confine yourself to even doing historical revisionist fiction whatever you want to call it - mash-ups gimmick lit absurdist fiction - I don't know if I want to do that anymore.

I'm mostly a novelist these days but I have written short stories in Fantasy Science Fiction and horror.

Weapons of mass destruction aren't pulled out of a black hat like a white rabbit at a magic show. They're produced in factories. There's science and technology involved. They're not produced in a hole in the ground or in a basement.

Certainly going back to Sherlock Holmes we have a tradition of forensic science featured in detective stories.

A successful society is characterized by a rising living standard for its population increasing investment in factories and basic infrastructure and the generation of additional surplus which is invested in generating new discoveries in science and technology.

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 wrote the very first stories in science fiction which dealt with homosexuality The World Well Lost and Affair With a Green Monkey.

This much we know: Journalism is not a precise science. It's on its best day is a crude art. We make mistakes I make mistakes. With more than 50 years as a journalist I have at least had the opportunity to blow more stories make more mistakes than maybe anybody in television.

Politicians should read science fiction not westerns and detective stories.

Science coverage could be improved by the recognition that science is timeless and therefore science stories should not need to be pegged to an item in the news.

Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today - but the core of science fiction its essence has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.

We all had lots of stories of our sad experiences - they mourned the death of my wife with me - but we were hopeful that the children would return.

We all like stories that make us cry. It's so nice to feel sad when you've nothing in particular to feel sad about.

So far at least I haven't found a way to tell my kind of stories without making them both sad and funny.

The first series I wrote 'L.A. Candy ' was always meant to be a three-book series so when I started out it was all outlined that way and by the time I was done with the third book I had become so involved and the process and the stories I was a little bit sad to be done.

A lot of sad stories in a row - that wears on you.

Among the reasons people keep sad stories to themselves is that they do not want anyone to feel sorry for them. I don't. I don't want you to feel sorry for me.