Other people, including me, have written books with main characters who were old and rich. Or old and brilliant. Old sages, old wizards, old rich people.

Having a mother who had been an aeronautical engineer convinced me that more things should be open to women.

So when I got out of the military, I went back to school in biology, and earned a biology degree at the University of Texas, and then did some graduate work in it.

Everything in my life that I value has been gained at the cost of not saying what I really think and saying what they want me to say.

Hard to be a physics major at Rice University if you have flunked calculus.

Even if a tamed wolf makes a good sheepdog, he will never understand how the sheep feel....You are most fortunate. For having been, as you thought, a coward, and helpless to fight - you know what that is like. You know what bitterness that feeling breeds - you know in your own heart what kind of evil it brings. And so you are most fit to fight it where it occurs.

My first degree came years before my second. I had wanted to be a physicist, but I flunked calculus.