The kind of poetry to avoid in the pretty-pretty kind that pleased our grandmothers, the kind that Longfellow and Tennyson, good poets at their best, wrote at their worst.

Science fiction is a kind of archaeology of the future.

To divide one's life by years is of course to tumble into a trap set by our own arithmetic. The calendar consents to carry on its dull wall-existence by the arbitrary timetables we have drawn up in consultation with those permanent commuters, Earth and Sun. But we, unlike trees, need grow no annual rings.

Insomnia is a gross feeder. It will nourish itself on any kind of thinking, including thinking about not thinking.

I found nothing really wrong with this autobiography except poor choice of subject.

When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.

To read in bed is to draw around us invisible, noiseless curtains. Then at last we are in a room of our own and are ready to burrow back, back to that private life of the imagination we all led as a child and to whose secret satisfactions so many of us have mislaid the key.