That, to me, is the essence of science. You practically never have full and complete access to the internal workings of whatever it is you're trying to figure out. . . . In astronomy, of course, the problem is that everything is too far away. . . . How, then, do we figure out what's in the stars, and what makes them shine?

When you get right down to it, sci-fi writers are, very basically, just plain sneaky.

A man sits at a table on the city's busiest sidewalk. His table is big and covered with masks, hundreds of them. People pass him in an endless stream, just as they have been doing for years.

Our only child was a boy. Anna handed him to me when he was tiny and bawling, and I saw him die in a plane crash. I loved him anyway.