The premise of the Taker story is 'the world belongs to man'. … The premise of the Leaver story is 'man belongs to the world'.

Most beginning writers - and I was the same - are like chefs trying to cook great dishes that they've never tasted themselves. How can you make a great - or even an adequate - bouillabaisse if you've never had any? If you don't really understand why people read mysteries - or romances or literary novels or thrillers or whatever - then there's no way in the world you're going to write one that anyone wants to publish. This is the meaning of the well-known expression "Write what you know."

The mythology of your culture hums in your ears so constantly that no one pays the slightest bit of attention to it. Of course man is conquering space and the atom and the deserts and the oceans and the elements. According to your mythology, this is what he was BORN to do.

Many of the biggest and most far-reaching investments we make in our lives are investments that have little or nothing to do with money.

And in spite of all the mastery we've attained, we don't have enough mastery to stop devastating the world, or to repair the devastation we've already wrought.

You're captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live. … You are captives—and you have made a captive of the world itself. That's what's at stake, isn't it?—your captivity and the captivity of the world.

If the world is saved, it will not be saved by old minds with new programs but by new minds with no programs at all.