Beware: Ignorance Protects itself. Ignorance Promotes suspicion. Suspicion Engenders fear. Fear quails, Irrational and blind, Or fear looms, Defiant and closed. Blind, closed, Suspicious, afraid, Ignorance Protects itself, And protected, Ignorance grows.

...I realized that I knew less about loneliness than I had thought - and much less than I would know when he went away.

A workshop is a way of renting an audience, and making sure you're communicating what you think you're communicating. It's so easy as a young writer to think you're been very clear when in fact you haven't.

Civilization is the way one's own people live. Savagery is the way foreigners live.

...I can write my own stories and I can write myself in.

You don't start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it's good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That's why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.

No one was going to stop me from writing and no one had to really guide me towards science fiction. It was natural, really, that I would take that interest.