Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I’m borrowing energy from the ideas themselves.
In science fiction, we dream. In order to colonize in space, to rebuild our cities, which are so far out of whack, to tackle any number of problems, we must imagine the future, including the new technologies that are required.
Digression is the soul of wit. Take the philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet’s father’s ghost and what stays is dry bones.
Don’t talk about it; write.
Don’t ask for guarantees. And don’t look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were heading for shore.
A conglomerate heap of trash, that’s what I am. But it burns with a high flame.
There’s a lot of crap out there. Most of the science fiction films alone are abominations, you know. They’re mindless. So you can’t learn from those kinds of films.
The television, that insidious beast, that Medusa which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little.
Into the air, over the valleys, under the stars, above a river, a pond, a road, flew Cecy. Invisible as new spring winds, fresh as the breath of clover rising from twilight fields, she flew.
Painting fulfills a need to be non-intellectual. There are times when we have to get our brains out in our fingers.
I’ve grown up on a diet of metaphors. If young writers would find those writers who can give them metaphors by the bushel and the peck, then they’ll become better writers – to learn how to capsualize things and present them in metaphorical form.
My stories run up and bite me on the leg – I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.
Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.
Every story I’ve written was written because I had to write it. Writing stories is like breathing for me; it is my life.
I don’t like to go to theaters, because I don’t like the way most people behave in theaters.
Mysteries abound where most we seek for answers.
You grow ravenous. You run fevers. You know exhilarations. You can’t sleep at night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you in your bed. It is a grand way to live.
What is The Subconscious to every other man, in its creative aspect becomes, for writers, The Muse.
I can write faster on a typewriter than you can on a computer. I do 120 words a minute, and you can’t do that on a computer.
We have too many cellphones. We’ve got too many internets. We have got to get rid of those machines. We have too many machines now.