there are two kinds of humanity, those who dream and those who don't, and both tend to despise, or to tolerate, the other.

Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.

Little Tamar, forget the long ago. We are here and we are now, and that is all. We are making a new start.

Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.

The white man has settled like a locust over Africa, and, like the locusts in early morning, cannot take flight for the heaviness of the dew on their wings. But the dew that weights the white man is the money that he makes from our labor.

...She thinks, for the hundredth time, that in their emotional life all these intelligent men use a level so much lower than anything they use for work, that they might be different creatures.

You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn't care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can't be a way of life - the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.