The Unexpected always comes at the most awkward times.

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.

We are real black characters with real character, not the stars of American racist spectacle. Blackness is not probable cause.

The early morning has gold in its mouth.

Only the wounded physician heals.

Pain's nothing. Pain's what you give, not what you get.

We need to be careful when we talk about cutting health care costs. They are not going to be reduced - what we really want to do is do is slow the rate of increase.

I was born in 1970 and I got to see a little bit of [Richard] Nixon's attempts at redefining himself. I saw [Gerald] Ford.

Richard got married to a figure skater, and he bought her a dishwasher and a coffee percolator.

Art is the child of imagination and gives life.

Every new form of liberation is destined to eventually become another form of enslavement for most of its adherents.

To understand at all what life means, one must begin with Christian belief. And I think knowledge may be sorrow with a man unless he loves.