My problem with new writers is that it takes me five or six years to memorise the right names.

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.

At first the ancient images of the Goddess did not interest me.

If you're a champion, you have to have it in your heart.

One threatens the innocent who spares the guilty.

I had the conviction that lovemaking fools you. The overpowering emotions it induces make you think you're sharing the same feelings as the other person and that they're imagining the same as you.

It is my belief that books are living things.

Ya gotta live somewhere, but also you GET to live somewhere.

Money buys many things... The best of which is freedom.

The mind of a general ought to resemble and be as clear as the field-glass of a telescope.

There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.

The physical world is meaningless tonight And there is no other.