A wise man once said that all human activity is a form of play. And the highest form of play is the search for Truth, Beauty and Love. What more is needed? Should there be a ‘meaning’ as well, that will be a bonus? If we waste time looking for life’s meaning, we may have no time to live — or to play.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

I sometimes wonder how we spent leisure time before satellite television and Internet came along…and then I realise that I have spent more than half of my life in the ‘dark ages’!

If such a thing had happened once, it must surely have happened many times in this galaxy of a hundred billion suns.

We stand now at the turning point between two eras. Behind us is a past to which we can never return... The coming of the rocket brought to an end a million years of isolation... the childhood of our race was over and history as we know it began.

Space is what stops everything from happening in the same place.

I'm sure we would not have had men on the Moon if it had not been for Wells and Verne and the people who write about this and made people think about it. I'm rather proud of the fact that I know several astronauts who became astronauts through reading my books.