All male writers, incidentally, no matter how broke or otherwise objectionable, have pretty wives. Somebody should look into this.

A lot of critics think I'm stupid because my sentences are so simple and my method is so direct: they think these are defects. No. The point is to write as much as you know as quickly as possible.

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 biggest laughs are based on the biggest disappointments and the biggest fears.

Thank God for novelists. Thank God there are people willing to write everything down. Otherwise, so much would be forgotten.

Why throw money at problems? That is what money is for. Should the nation's wealth be redistributed? It has been and continues to be redistributed to a few people in a manner strikingly unhelpful.

Teaching, may I say, is the noblest profession of all in a democracy.