When my head is in the typewriter the last thing on my mind is some imaginary reader. I don't have an audience; I have a set of standards.

America can be saved only by what it's trying to destroy.

You need to know things the others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.

We feel certain that the extraterrestrial message is a mathematical code of some kind. Probably a number code. Mathematics is the one language we might conceivably have in common with other forms of intelligent life in the universe. As I understand it, there is no reality more independent of our perception and more true to itself than mathematical reality.

Be willing to die for your beliefs, or computer printouts of your beliefs.

I think fiction comes from everything you've ever done, and said, and dreamed, and imagined. It comes from everything you've read and haven't read... I think my work comes out of the culture of the world around me. I think that's where my language comes from.

Men with secrets tend to be drawn to each other, not because they want to share what they know but because they need the company of the like-minded, the fellow afflicted.