Patrick deWitt

I've stopped reading about the death of books because it's wasteful and morbid and insulting to the authors, agents, publishers, booksellers, critics, and readers that keep the world community of fiction interesting.

I had ordered long legs, but they never arrived. My eyes are weird too, one is gray and the other is green. I have a crooked smile and my nose looks like a ski slope. No, I would not win a Miss contest.

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.