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• Fiction has to be plausible. All history has to do is happen.
  • Interview at the World Science Fiction Convention (25 June 1998)

• Many things are possible. Few things are certain.
  • Interview in Cybling (February 2001)

• I see people who write characters who are loonies and make them convincing and believable, and I envy them tremendously. I don’t really understand them. It’s funny, because I’ve created my own monster. In the ‘Great War’ and ‘American Empire’ books, I’m writing the person who is the functional equivalent of Adolf Hitler. I’m inside his head — and that’s a very strange place for somebody who thinks of himself as a fairly rational fellow to be. That’s alarming
  • Turtledove on Jake Featherston in an interview with Locus magazine (February 2003)

• I suspect S.F. has an individualistic, antiauthoritarian trend to it not least because so many of the people who read and write it (not all by any means, but quite a few) are innerdirected introverts who make neither good leaders nor good followers. Am I talking about myself? Well, now that you mention it, yes. But I ain’t the only one, not even close.
  • Tor's Worlds Without Death or Taxes (December 2008)

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• I'm a social caterpillar. I am not a social butterfly

• I can't not write. I'm obsessive-compulsive, and I know it.