John Scalzi

“For as much as I hate the cemetery, I’ve been grateful it’s here, too. I miss my wife. It’s easier to miss her at a cemetery, where she’s never been anything but dead, than to miss her in all the places where she was alive.”

“It took me eight books to finally be at a point in my career where I could come out with a book and say, 'This is meant to be a funny book,' and we didn't have to make any bones about it.”

“Personally speaking, when everything is boiled down to the marrow, I think the reason Reddit tolerates the creepy forums has to do with money more than anything else.”

“After our negotiations were completed, the dome would be imploded and launched toward the nearest black hole, so that none of its atoms would ever contaminate this particular universe again. I thought that last part was overkill.”

“Is it painful?" the groundskeeper asked. "I am asking for science.”

“You can’t afford anthropomorphic biases when some of the aliens most like us would rather make human hamburgers than peace.”

“As a reader, I have a very short attention span and a low tolerance for boredom, and I find that comes in handy with my writing. If I get bored writing something, I pity the people who will then try to read it.”

“Creativity eventually comes from the need not to have ourselves or other people eaten by leopards.”

“Part of what makes us human is what we mean to other people, and what people mean to us. I miss meaning something to someone, having that part of being human.”

“When I was 10, I was hit by a car, which turned my right tibia into a jigsaw puzzle.”

“I don't keep a Bucket List. I'm open to anything.”

“I'm more interested in becoming a commercial writer, and unfortunately, commentary on my writing from a bunch of other unpublished writers is of little utility in that regard. Being a better writer is something of a moot point, since if you're not a commercial writer to some extent, very few people will know whether your writing is any good or not.”

“I know a little bit about deaf culture because a friend of mine has been in the deaf culture for awhile. Over the course of 25 years, she and I have talked about many of the issues and concerns for deaf people and deaf culture.”

“The more I want a book to be done, the faster I type because I just want to get it out.”

“I grew up in southern California in the '80s. Yes, I am a walking cliche.”

“Destiny gets compressed, you know, into just that small fraction of a second you have right in front of you at any one time. And there’s nothing romantic about keeping your head down to avoid getting shot, or trying to save a friend who’s been injured, or coming face to face with a creature who is as smart and mean and as terrified of dying as you are, and who wants to make sure that if someone is left on the ground there, it’s you and not it.”

“The universe isn't going to be conquered by legions of geriatrics. No offense.”

“I tell people the first time I decided to write a novel I was in my mid-20s, and it was, 'Well, it's time to see if I can do this.' I basically flipped a coin to see if I was going to write science fiction or if I was going to do a crime novel. The coin toss went to science fiction.”

“Reddit is not a public utility or a public square; it's a privately owned space on the Internet.”

“I don't think we're at the point where most people are willing to get rid of body parts and replace them, but then again, people who shoot lasers in their eyes come out with better-than-perfect vision.”