The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.
I discovered very early on that if you wanted a thing, you went for it – and you got it. Most people never go anywhere, or want anything – so they never get anything.
First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys.
There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.
We’ve let too much time go by. We’ve been busy with war instead of being busy with peace. And that’s what space travel is all about. It’s all about peace and exploration and wonder and beauty.
We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over.
We’re going to become the martians when we land there. When we explore and build communities, we become the martians. That’s a wonderful destiny for all of us.
Why live? Life was its own answer. Life was the propagation of more life and the living of as good a life as possible.
May you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.
My stories are warnings; they’re not predictions. If they were predictions, I wouldn’t do them. Because then I’d be part of the doom-ridden psychology. But every time I name a problem, I try to give a solution.
If you have moved over vast territories and dared to love silly things, you will have learned even from the most primitive items collected and put aside in your life.
When I graduated from high school I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library 3 days a week for 10 years.
The trouble with a lot of people who try to write is they intellectualize about it. That comes after. The intellect is given to us by God to test things once they’re done, not to worry about things ahead of time.
A story should be like a river, flowing and never stopping, your readers passengers on a boat, whirling downstream through constantly refreshing and changing scemery.
We’re a free society; we’ve got television. We have radio. We have newspapers. We have the videocassette, which is coming into play. These are new freedoms.
I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it’s better than college.
The answer to all writing, to any career for that matter, is love.
It’s not going to do any good to land on Mars if we’re stupid.
When you grow up in science fiction you grow up in everything! It’s the greatest and only field worth growing up in. It’s the total field.
We travel for romance, we travel for architecture, and we travel to be lost.