On this day I want to tell you about, which will be about a thousand years from now, there were a boy, a girl and a love story.

My first thought was always a cigarette. It still is, but I haven't cheated.

Advertising reaches out to touch the fantasy part of people's lives. And you know, most people's fantasies are pretty sad.

You don't think progress goes in a straight line, do you? Do you recognize that it is an ascending, accelerating, maybe even exponential curve? It takes hell's own time to get started, but when it goes it goes like a bomb.

My old English buddy, John Rackham, wrote and told me what made science fiction different from all other kinds of literature - science fiction is written according to the science fiction method.

I did that for 40 years or more. I never had any writer's block. I got up in the morning, sat down at the typewriter - now, computer - lit up a cigarette.

That's what life is, just one learning experience after another, and when you're through with all the learning experiences you graduate and what you get for a diploma is, you die.