Norman Spinrad

If I had parallel lives to pursue, I would also want one as a painter.

You can really do more than you think you can do.

When you're in the States and you're a writer and you've got money and you walk into a bank, you're a bum with money.

There are certain things that ordinary people have that celebrities don't have.

The world has become more complex as technology and easy travel mixes cultures without homogenizing them.

The thematic, psychological, and cultural concerns of a writer are more relevant than whatever literary mode he or she chooses to deal with in any given novel.

Mexico was conquered more by manipulation of myth and archetype.

It's trite to say that the world has gotten smaller in the age of globalization, but my travels have told me that it's wrong to think this means there is some kind of uniform world culture.

Is anything accidental?

In America, if you don't do a 100 million dollars, you've done nothing.

If it's not American, the French won't go see it.

As a child, I read science fiction, but from the very beginnings of my reading for pleasure, I read a lot of non-fictional history, particularly historical biography.

I've always been interested in the relationship between total external surround, culture, the political matrix, technology, etc., and the internal human consciousness.

I'm not gifted, but I'm not hopeless.

I write in American slang.

I was a precocious reader.

I never learned to read music.

I must admit to being greatly influenced by Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces.

I get work because I'm primarily a novelist but I've become script doctor. I can work back and forth between French and English.

I believe that interest in heroes is universal and eternal.

English is taking over the world. I just wrote a piece about it. And it's not by design. The United States dominates because it's the biggest market.