It's not the sentiments of men which make history but their actions.

I don't read other writers because I'm writing all the time. It's too disturbing to read a writer with a good style when you're in the middle of putting your work together.

Amateurs... venture into scenes that a writer with more experience (and more professional concern) would bypass or eschew altogether.

Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists.

What characterizes a member of a minority group is that he is forced to see himself as both exceptional and insignificant, marvelous and awful, good and evil.

I respect most boxers because they're violent people who learned to discipline themselves ... a good boxer is an artist ... Boxing is existential - some fights are better than others.

Armstrong, sitting in the commander's seat, spacesuit on, helmet on, plugged into electrical and environmental umbilical's, is a man who is not only a machine himself in the links of these networks, but is also a man sitting in (what Collins is later to call) a 'mini-cathedral.' a man somewhat more than a pilot, somewhat more than a superpilot, is in fact a veritable high priest of the forces of society and scientific history concentrated in that mini cathedral, a general of the church of the forces of technology.