What really fascinates me is this need that is so strong now that if you read a work of the imagination you instantly have to say, 'Oh, what this really is is so-and-so,' reducing it to a simple formula.

Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so.

One certainty we all accept is the condition of being uncertain and insecure.

That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.

When I started, there were no big interviews, no television, no profiles and all that. The publishers were quite shockingly uncommercial, but they did look after their writers.

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

But children can't be a center of life and a reason for being. They can be a thousand things that are delightful, interesting, satisfying, but they can't be a well-spring to live from. Or they shouldn't be.