Reason shapes the future, but superstition infects the present.

The bomb lives only as it is falling.

I just come up with the stories and write them as well as I can. There's not really a great deal of strokey-beard thinking going on.

A guilty system recognizes no innocents.

Half the fun of writing a novel is finding out from other people later on what you actually meant.

But it was pointless, it was stupid; he thought about thoughtless things. If I were a seabird . . . but how could you be a seabird? If you were a seabird your brain would be tiny and stupid and you would love half-rotted fish guts and tweaking the eyes out of little grazing animals; you would know no poetry and you could never appreciate flying as fully as the human on the ground yearning to be you. If you wanted to be a seabird you deserved to be one.

Science fiction has its own history, its own legacy of what's been done, what's been superseded, what's so much part of the furniture it's practically part of the fabric now, what's become no more than a joke... and so on. It's just plain foolish, as well as comically arrogant, to ignore all this, to fail to do the most basic research.