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Every question is a hypothetical question for everyone but the person who asks it.

I think there is often a 'what if' proposition that gets me thinking about all my novels.

Get into the habit of imagining an alternate scenario. By posing such 'imagine if' questions... we can distance ourselves from the frames, cues, anchors and rhetoric that might be affecting us.

I would just randomly blurt out things like, 'What if a man showed up today and was carrying an umbrella, but it wasn't raining?' Eventually, people started to call me weird.

Hypothetical questions get hypothetical answers.

Life's short. Anything could happen, and it usually does, so there is no point in sitting around thinking about all the ifs, ands and buts.

I love the 'what if' nature of sci-fi.

I've always been slightly preoccupied with death or whatever those kind of silly big questions people will tell you to not spend your time worrying about.

Whenever I start a novel, I'm always looking for two things: a bit of science that makes me go 'what if?' and a piece of history that ends in a question mark.

Imagine somebody says you are going to die in a few weeks; I'd really rather not know.