Elizabeth Moon

“No, but a cello is the perfect string bass for an accordion. Works with it beautifully.”

“My first degree came years before my second. I had wanted to be a physicist, but I flunked calculus.”

“I regarded drugs as somewhat like rattlesnakes - it's possible to pick one up without getting bit, but why bother?”

“It may be far in the future, but there's some kind of logical way to get from where we are to where the science fiction is.”

“I like the Beatles, of course, but that's when I grew up.”

“In a novel, I could submerge my ego in a character's and let his perceptions take over.”

“I used to not back down from a challenge.”

“I was writing fiction, but not finishing fiction.”

“I can become very emotional about math, although I'm not that good at it.”

“The test of a sword is not its polish but its temper”

“My personal feeling about science fiction is that it's always in some way connected to the real world, to our everyday world.”

“You can also make explicit certain social problems which, again, would be prejudged or not encountered at all in real life, because people have set up defenses against it. Fantasy allows you to get past defenses.”

“One of my degrees was a science degree in biology.”

“Now my mother, interestingly enough, was not a feminist in her own mind.”

“I had, of course, no model for that sort of woman being married, but I can make that up as I go along.”

“But in fantasy, you can make a complete break, and you can put people in a situation where they are confronted with things that they would not confront in the real world.”

“Hard to be a physics major at Rice University if you have flunked calculus.”

“There are relatively few science fiction or fantasy books with the main character being an old person.”

“So when I got out of the military, I went back to school in biology, and earned a biology degree at the University of Texas, and then did some graduate work in it.”

“Other people, including me, have written books with main characters who were old and rich. Or old and brilliant. Old sages, old wizards, old rich people.”