People tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember. Writers are always selling somebody out.

In the absence of a natural disaster we are left again to our own uneasy devices.

I read so ravenously that I would read through whole categories. I was crazy about reading biographies. [...] I think biographies are very urgent to children.

I was no longer, if I had ever been, afraid to die: I was now afraid not to die.

The impulse for much writing is homesickness. You are trying to get back home, and in your writing you are invoking that home, so you are assuaging the homesickness.

The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.

To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything.