Before diagnosing yourself with depression or low self esteem, make sure that you are not in fact surrounded by assholes.

[on Neil Gaiman] A writer of rare perception and endless imagination.

Maybe I'm a romantic, but I think in the old days it was done by guys who couldn't do anything else, guys like Phil Dick. That's all he could do, sit there and write endless novels. These are the people Bruce Sterling calls "Paranoid Pervert Saints of Science Fiction." They were pariahs of literature, whipping these strange ideas around. When I was a teenager growing up in southwestern Virginia in the 1960s, SF was absolutely the only source of subversives ideas that I had. I used to read these books and think, "Wow! No one knows I'm reading this!" It was below people's attention. Well, that subversive level of science fiction has fallen off terribly. The bulk of this stuff is consumer product, dog food, and there's so much of it. When I walk into an SF bookstore, my head swims. I remember when I could buy every new SF paperback published in America every month, because there were two.