There are plenty of good reasons for fighting.

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.

If you can't write clearly, you probably don't think nearly as well as you think you do.

Evolution is so creative. That's how we got giraffes.

All the great story lines are great practical jokes that people fall for over and over again.

My country is in ruins. So I'm a fish in a poisoned fishbowl. I'm mostly just heartsick about this. There should have been hope. This should have been a great country. But we are despised all over the world now. I was hoping to build a country and add to its literature. That's why I served in World War II, and that's why I wrote books.

Here was what Kilgore Trout cried out to me in my father's voice: "Make me young, make me young, make me young!