. . . but the Universe is an awfully big place. There is room enough for an awful lot of people to be right about things and still not agree.

History is merely a list of surprises... It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.

I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the center.

When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away.

Well, it's an ancestral tribe. These were immigrants from north of Germany who came here about the time of the Civil War, but anyway, these people called themselves free thinkers. They were impressed, incidentally, by Darwin. They're called Humanists now; people who aren't so sure that the Bible is the Word of God.

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.

And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.