My favorite definition of an intellectual: 'Someone who has been educated beyond his/her intelligence'.

Trying to predict the future is a discouraging and hazardous occupation. If by some miracle a prophet could describe the future exactly as it was going to take place, his predictions would sound so absurd that people everyone would laugh him to scorn. The only thing we can be sure of about the future is that it will be absolutely fantastic. So, if what I say now seems to you to be very reasonable, then I will have failed completely. Only if what I tell you appears absolutely unbelievable have we any chance of visualizing the future as it really will happen.

When beauty is universal, it loses its power to move the heart, and only its absence can produce any emotional effect.

A precondition for being a science fiction writer other than an interest in the future is that, an interest - at least an understanding of science, not necessarily a science degree but you must have a feeling for the science and its possibilities and its impossibilities, otherwise you're writing fantasy. Now, fantasy is also fine, but there is a distinction, although no one's ever been able to say just where the dividing lines come.

Absolutely no religious rites of any kind, relating to any religious faith, should be associated with my funeral.

Why, Robert Singh often wondered, did we give our hearts to friends whose life spans are so much shorter than our own?

My objection to organized religion is the premature conclusion to ultimate truth that it represents.