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.

One of the biggest roles of science fiction is to prepare people to accept the future without pain and to encourage a flexibility of the mind. Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.

Utopia was here at last: its novelty had not yet been assailed by the supreme enemy of a ll Utopias - boredom.

If man can live in Manhattan, he can live anywhere.

A man who grows that much hair,' critics were fond of saying, 'must have a lot to hide.

Even if we never reach the stars by our own efforts, in the millions of years that lie ahead it is almost certain that the stars will come to us. Isolationism is neither a practical policy on the national or cosmic scale. And when the first contact with the outer universe is made, one would like to think that Mankind played an active and not merely a passive role-that we were the discoverers, not the discovered.

But please remember: this is only a work of fiction. The truth, as always, will be far stranger.