Anything that can go wrong, will

Ethics change with technology.

SF isn't a genre; SF is the matrix in which genres are embedded, and because the SF field is never going in any one direction at any one time, there is hardly a way to cut it off.

The human species really could have faced global thermonuclear war. During seventy years of Cold War we grew used to it.

Everything starts as somebody's daydream.

In the world of words the imagination is one of the forces of nature.

In hindsight it may even seem inevitable that a socialist society will starve when it runs out of capitalists.

You learn by writing short stories. Keep writing short stories. The money's in novels, but writing short stories keeps your writing lean and pointed.

We learn only to ask more questions.

It's very difficult for a black man to get out of South-Central Los Angeles, and get out civilized....The only men I know who have escaped, all began reading Robert Heinlein at age ten.

One mark of a good officer, he remembered, was the ability to make quick decisions. If they happen to be right, so much the better.

He was rather clumsy and shy and looked as if he'd spent the last ten years of his life locked up in a library - hardly the kind of man any girl your age dreams of ...

You have to forgive yourself for your past mistakes, and you have to forgive those that hurt you for what they did to you, or you're never going to fully move on.

You can't eat books, sweetheart.

Every extreme attitude is a fight from the self.

The one continuing problem in my life has always had the shape of just one question: What amusing thing can I do next?

I had in mind a long career.

If you have no agenda of your own, life will work according to its agenda. Your personal agenda is taking you further and further away from that.

If you think love makes you happy, you've either never been in love, or never been in love long enough to have to start compromising.

Our greatest joy and our greatest pain comes in our relationships with others.

Don't let ambition get so far ahead that it loses sight of the job at hand.