I have a kind of psychic invisibility. As long as I can stay scared, I can keep people from seeing me. That's what we have to count on.

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.

Snobbery might sometimes look cool, like smoking, but the end result is usually a repelling one.

Jamie's gonna go take a break now, and i am going to continue the on-going process of making a fool of myself and go ahead and try it myself.

Might the peasant expect the Almighty to stay the thunder storm, which clears the air of a nation from pestilence, lest the lightning bold should in its flash kill his cow?

I think too many artists from my era tend to just stamp out a record.

We're running a war by politicians and we're running a war by political correctness as per that question [with ISIS].

When we move apart, she looks at me again, till a small tear lifts itself up in her eye. It trips out to find a wrinkle and follows it down.

The shift in the world begins with a shift in our thinking. Shifting our thinking does not change the world, but it creates a condition where the shift in the world becomes possible.

For thousands of years, you humans have been throwing in everything as you come across--hopes, dreams, wishes that never came true. Irresponsible waste management, if you ask me.

Tolerance is the uncomfortable feeling that in the end the other could be right.