Actually ideas are everywhere. It's the paperwork, that is, sitting down and thinking them into a coherent story, trying to find just the right words, that can and usually does get to be labor.

I don't know why a computer game can't be an art form just as a puppet show or an opera is. I'm still interested in computer games as something I would like to work on someday.

My gut feeling is that paper and ink are going to be with us for a long time yet, and in substantial quantities, though certainly books are now going to be available in other forms.

Probably all the books I've ever written have been efforts to define the boundaries of humanity.

More immediately, I'm currently working on another Dracula in which there will be connections with ancient Egypt. That's about as far as I want to go in commenting on current work.

If people ask me for the ingredients of success, I say one is talent, two is stubbornness or determination, and third is sheer luck. You have to have two out of the three. Any two will probably do.

I started writing seriously about 1960, at the fairly advanced age of 30.

Only towards the end of this process are any of the chapters in fully readable condition, a state of affairs that used to alarm my wife. But Joan's got used to it.

Research is of considerable importance in certain fields, such as science and history.

I finally decided one day, reading science fiction magazines of the time, I could do at least as well as some of these people are doing. So I finally made a serious effort.

I suspect that writer's block afflicts mainly people who have some stable and ample source of income outside of writing. So far it hasn't been a problem.

A poet is someone who can use a single image to send a universal message.

We live thinking we will never die, We die thinking we have never lived

I support any procedure that allows photographers to express themselves, whether that involves color, black and white, platinum, palladium and digital technology.

'Without the help of mathematics,' the wise man continued, 'the art could not advance and all the sciences would perish.'

Listening is the key to everything good in music.

You go back and tell Brigham Young that I'll give up the Lord's money when he sends me a receipt signed by the Lord, and no sooner.

There is no being so poor and so contemptible, who does not think there is somebody still poorer, and still more contemptible.

Chess is not for timid souls.

The pure soul shall mount on native wings, . . . and cut a path into the heaven of glory.

And mind, with my heart in't; and now farewell Till half an hour hence.