Mickey Drexler

When I started at Bloomingdale's as a buyer, Alexander's was a discounter across the street, and every time Alexander's had something that we had at Bloomingdale's, we'd have to meet price. I didn't really want to be in a business where I had no control over my inventory, the value of my inventory.

It didn't take long for the world to realize that the Shah was an enlightened liberal next to the bloody reactionary regime that followed, and which executed more people in three months than the Shah had done in 30 years.

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.