That's what the movies do. They don't entertain us, they don't send the message: 'We care.' They give us lines to say, they assign us parts: John Wayne, Theda Bara, Shirley Temple, take your pick.

Barbie's one of those fads whose popularity makes you lose all faith in the human race.

Writers are too neurotic to ever be happy.

One has not lived until one has carried a sixty-pound dog down a sweeping flight of stairs at half-past V in the morning.

Science fiction is an amazing literature: plot elements that you would think would be completely worn out by now keep changing into surprising new forms.

It is my belief that everything you need to know about the world can be learned in a church choir.

And every place and time an author writes about is imaginary, from Oz to Raymond Chandler's L.A. to Dickens's London.