As a teacher, it's a great help to be teaching philosophical systems you don't believe. You can actually do a better job of presenting them if you leave your beliefs at the door.

The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.

Blue is therefore most suitable as the color of interior life.

Sports, politics, and religion are the three passions of the badly educated.

it is discouraging to leave the past behind only to see it coming toward you like the thunderstorm which drenched you yesterday.

It’s not the word made flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word

For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier stock.

I am unlikely to trust a sentence that comes easily.

I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.

The expression to write something down suggests a descent of thought to the fingers whose movements immediately falsify it.

The speeding reader guts a book the way the skillful clean fish. The gills are gone, the tail, the scales, the fins; then the fillet slides away swifly as though fed to a seal.

The last thing he wanted was to see the bright, shining, happy faces of the other angels up there.

Retain the vision for space exploration. If we turn our backs on the vision again, we're going to have to live in a secondary position in human space flight for the rest of the century.

I do not like detached creation. Neither can I conceive of the mind as detached from itself. Each of my works, each diagram of myself, each glacial flowering of my inmost soul dribbles over me.

We have had enough, once and for all, of Hedonism--the gloomy philosophy which says that Pleasure is the only good.

If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell

Life is nature's way to give mind oportunities it wouldn't otherwise had.

I know there's a balance, I see it when I swing past.

There's been a lot of speculation about every single girl I'm with and it actually does quite irritate me after a while, more so because it's a complete pain for the girls.

Labor is the true alchemist that beats out in patient transmutation the baser metals into gold.

I suppose even a woman's hatred is a kind of love.