The <i>only</i> thing worth writing about is people. <i>People</i>. Human beings. Men and women whose individuality must be created, line by line, in… - Harlan Ellison

I was the green monkey, the pariah. And I had no friends. Not just a few friends, or one good friend, or grudging acceptance by other misfits and outcasts. I was alone. All stinking alone, without even an imaginary playmate.

Since the first night of Man, hunkered down hairy and hungry by the primeval lightning-borne food fire, fear has been the prime mover. Forget momma love and posterity and men’s unquenchable curiosity. Fear is the principle mode of locomotion of homo sapiens.

People on the outside think there’s something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn’t like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that’s all there is to it.