It often is a terrible insult to some families if one of the kids turns out to be an artist and that's one way to really shake up the family if you haven't got nerve enough to turn into a homosexual.

It's an astonishing skill that people can read, and read well. Very few people can read well. For instance, I have to be very careful with irony, saying something while meaning the exact opposite.

The feeling persists that no one can simultaneously be a respectable writer and understand how a refrigerator works, just as no gentleman wears a brown suit in the city. Colleges may be to blame. English majors are encouraged, I know, to hate chemistry and physics, and to be proud because they are not dull and creepy and humorless and war-oriented like the engineers across the quad. And our most impressive critics have commonly been such English majors, and they are squeamish about technology to this very day. So it is natural for them to despise science fiction.

The trouble with God isn't that He so seldom makes Himself known to us... He's holding you and me and everybody else by the scruff of the neck practically _constantly... Contentedly adrift in the cosmos, were you?... That is a perfect description of a non-epiphany, that rarest of moments, when God Almighty lets go of the scruff of your neck and lets you be human for a little while.

I beg you to believe the most ridiculous superstition of all: that humanity is at the center of the universe, the fulfiller or frustrateor of the grandest dreams of God Almighty.

I am a monopolar depressive descended from monopolar depressives. That's how come I write so good.

When I worked with General Electric, again this was soon after the Second World War, you know, I was keeping up with new developments and they showed me a milling machine and this thing worked by punch cards - that's where computers were at that time, and everybody was sort of sheepish about how well this thing worked because in those days machinists were treated as though they were great musicians because they were virtuosos on these machines.