Our lives are about development, mutation and the possibility of change; that is almost a definition of what life is: change... If you disable change, if you effectively stop time, if you prevent the possibility of the alteration of an individual's circumstances — and that must include at least the possibility that they alter for the worse — then you don't have life after death; you just have death.

My point has always been that, ever since the Industrial Revolution, science fiction has been the most important genre there is.

I'm saying with very few exceptions nothing lasts forever, and among those exceptions, no work or thought of man is numbered.

One of the advantages of having laws is the pleasure one may take in breaking them.

Most mainstream male fiction is littered with heroines, and female characters are basically so great, you want to fall in love with them.

You have to have something worth saying and then the ability to say it- writing's a double skill, really.

All our lives are symbols. Everything we do is part of a pattern we have at least some say in. The strong make their own patterns and influence other people's, the weak have their courses mapped out for them. The weak and the unlucky, and the stupid.