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.

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.

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.

When I was kidnapped as a child my parents sent a letter to the hijackers me Pay 5, 000 dollars or your back

We each begin in innocence. We all become guilty.

The delusion of entertainment is devoid of meaning. It may amuse us for a bit, but after the initial hit we are left with the dark feeling of desolation.

It is not the number of years we have behind us, but the number we have before us, that makes us careful and responsible and determined to find out the truth about everything.

Having lived in a collapsed empire before - I lived in Russia right after the Soviet Union collapsed - you can see a lot of the classic signs of an empire that's on its way out.

We used to get on planes, and they'd ask who we were, and we'd say, 'The Dave Brubeck Quartet', and they'd say, 'Who?' In later years they'd say, 'Oh', which amounts to the same thing.

As the snake is separate from its slough, even so is the Spirit separate from the body.

I think our system is being polluted by money.

I just write... if it's really good, it's going on the record. If it's average, it's going in the trash.

I often felt like I was walking around with this Scarlet Letter stitched to my chest from the way that people treated me.