Anyone who wants simple, pat stories should buy another author's product. The real universe ain't that way, and neither are my fictive ones.

You don't have conversations with microprocessors. You tell them what to do, then helplessly watch the disaster when they take you literally!

When it comes to privacy and accountability, people always demand the former for themselves and the latter for everyone else.

It is said that power corrupts, but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power.

The village is coming back, like it or not.

In all of history, we have found just one cure for error—a partial antidote against making and repeating grand, foolish mistakes, a remedy against self-deception. That antidote is criticism.

Why must conversions always come so late? Why do people always apologize to corpses?

If you believe you can make a living as a writer, you already have enough ego.

The worst mistake of first contact, made throughout history by individuals on both sides of every new encounter, has been the unfortunate habit of making assumptions. It often proved fatal.

My first duty to write a gripping yarn. Second is to convey credible characters who make you feel what they feel. Only third comes the idea.

But honestly, if you do a rigorous survey of my work, I'll bet you'll find that biology is a theme far more often than physical science.

For the first time in my life, I was in a shoot-out. A real, honest-to-goodness shoot-out with a bad guy. And, apparently, we both sucked.

I was left behind with the immensity of existing things. A river, suffering because reflections of clouds and tress and not clouds and trees.

Stop complaining. Plot your course and start your journey. Adjust your sail. Success is waiting to welcome you.

The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits.

All libraries must submit to a certain order, I answered. Indeed, agreed the professor, or all will be lost. The fall of nations and empires begins with the fall of libraries.

The arts often realize human truths well before other branches of human endeavor.

Hardware: where the people in your company's software section will tell you the problem is. Software: where the people in your company's hardware section will tell you the problem is.

All creative work has its greatest reality while it is still in a man's mind, before he begins to execute it.

Faith isn't about having everything figured out ahead of time; faith is about following the quiet voice of God without having everything figured out ahead of time.

In all evils which admit a remedy, impatience is to be avoided, because it wastes that time and attention in complaints, that, if properly applied might remove the cause.