Science is no more than an investigation of a miracle we can never explain, and art is an interpretation of that miracle.
These are all novels, all about people that never existed, the people that read them it makes them unhappy with their own lives. Makes them want to live in other ways they can never really be.
A good night sleep, or a ten minute bawl, or a pint of chocolate ice cream, or all three together, is good medicine.
The blizzard doesn’t last forever; it just seems so.
There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.
It was a pleasure to burn.
I have two rules in life – to hell with it, whatever it is, and get your work done.
It takes writing a billion bad words before you get to the good ones.
Men are nuts. Young men are crazy. We all love toys. I’m toy oriented. I write about toys. I’ve got a lot of toys. Hundreds of things. But computers are toys, and men like to mess around with smart dumb things. They feel creative.
I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.
Recreate the world in your own image and make it better for your having been here.
Men read science fiction to build the future. Women don’t need to read it. They are the future.
The things that you do should be things that you love, and things that you love should be things that you do.
When rivers flooded, when fire fell from the sky, what a fine place the library was, the many rooms, the books. With luck, no one found you. How could they! – when you were off to Tanganyika in ’98, Cairo in 1812, Florence in 1492!?
Libraries are absolutely at the center of my life. Since I couldn’t afford to go to college, I attended the library three or four days a week from the age of eighteen on, and graduated from the library when I was twenty-eight.
Sometimes you have intuitive insight about how you think things are going to be, and you write that. Other times you fantasize completely, which has nothing to do with predicting the future.
What are the best things and the worst things in your life, and when are you going to get around to whispering or shouting them?
Poverty made a sound like a wet cough in the shadows of the room.
In your reading, find books to improve your color sense, your sense of shape and size in the world.
The history of science fiction started in the caves 20,000 years ago. The ideas on the walls of the cave were problems to be solved. It’s problem solving. Primitive scientific knowledge, primitive dreams, primitive blueprinting: to solve problems.