Today's robots are very primitive, capable of understanding only a few simple instructions such as 'go left', 'go right', and 'build car'.

An artist's life is supposed to lead toward his masterpiece, not away from it.

Most publishers seem very reluctant to publish short story collections at all; they bring them out in paperback, often disguised as novels.

This is mainly because I spend a lot of time writing and so don't have much time to read; I hate to waste that time reading what may turn out to be junk food for the mind, when there's so much real writing to be read.

I have a kind of standard explanation why, which goes like this: Science fiction is one way of making sense out of a senseless world.

R-4 got stuck on the First Law. "Can anyone really protect a human being from all harm whatever?" it thought. "No. It is inevitable that all humans must be injured, contract illnesses and ultimately die. The future can only be averted for humans who are already dead. Ergo..." It took a dozen cops to subdue R-4, after his blood orgy in a department store (83 dead, none injured).

We didn't have a phone when I was a kid, and I was too shy to smash any public phones, and our town didn't have a pool hall either, so I had to hang out at the public library - and anyway, I told myself stories.