People ask me how I do research for my science fiction. The answer is, I never do any research.

The science fiction method is dissection and reconstruction.

A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.

You can't really predict the future. All you can do is invent it.

My old English buddy, John Rackham, wrote and told me what made science fiction different from all other kinds of literature - science fiction is written according to the science fiction method.

My first thought was always a cigarette. It still is, but I haven't cheated.

It's clear that science and science fiction have overlapping populations.

What were we doing here? Traveling hundreds or thousands of light-years, to break our hearts?

That's what life is, just one learning experience after another, and when you're through with all the learning experiences you graduate and what you get for a diploma is, you die.

For someone to be taken seriously it was valuable to have the appearance of someone who deserved to be taken seriously.

I did that for 40 years or more. I never had any writer's block. I got up in the morning, sat down at the typewriter - now, computer - lit up a cigarette.

Just because somebody smiles when he hands me a bag of shit, that doesn't mean I have to take it. I don't give a damn how friendly he is. It's what he does that matters.

Why not seize the pleasure at once? How often is happiness destroyed by preparation foolish preparation?

I'm a Larry David fan, right? And it seems to me that Jewish history from the Talmud on has been a self-deprecating, self-critical kind of humor.

The Democrats just don't have a foreign policy that they're willing to defend, that they're willing to use to take down the president's. We're dealing with the power of suggestion here.

You can't really explain to anyone the experience onset, you actually have to see it to understand what we're all going through. Some days we can be on set 15 - 17 hrs. Plus then there's training.

That's all the freedom we canhope for - the freedom to choose our prison. [...]

If you'd rather go to the football game than read a comic, that's fine. I'd rather do both.

Let others wage war. You, lucky Austria, shall marry.

Unfortunately, too many executives believe the myths about trust. Myths like how trust is soft and is merely a social virtue. The reality is that trust is hard-edged and is an economic driver.

Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs.