There's an old Sysan saying that the soup of life is salty enough without adding tears to it.

I think the easiest people to fool are ourselves. Fooling ourselves may even be a necessary precondition for fooling others.

The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn't.

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

I deliberately keep myself apart from a lot of stuff; I don't Tweet, I don't do Facebook, I don't blog, and that's largely because I spend my working life staring at a screen and hitting a keyboard, I am trying to cut down on that, not increase it.

Truth, I have learned, differs for everybody. Just as no two people ever see a rainbow in exactly the same place - and yet both most certainly see it, while the person seemingly standing right underneath it does not see it at all - so truth is a question of where one stands, and the direction one is looking in at the time.

Science fiction has its own history, its own legacy of what's been done, what's been superseded, what's so much part of the furniture it's practically part of the fabric now, what's become no more than a joke...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.