Jim Pattison

I've made more mistakes than anyone I know. Sometimes I learned something, and sometimes I just find myself doing it again. It makes me mad when I wasn't smart enough to learn the first time. You just think it's going to be different the next time, and it's not, as it turns out.

The historical novelist has to consider what has actually happened, while the SF writer is dealing in possibilities, but they are both in the business of imagining a world unlike our own and yet connected to it.