The world, like a great iris of an even more gigantic eye, which has also just opened and stretched out to encompass everything, stared back at him.

We are all . . . children of this universe. Not just Earth, or Mars, or this system, but the whole grand fireworks. And if we are interested in Mars at all, it is only because we wonder over our past and worry terribly about our possible future.

If someone sends you a love letter you've got to answer back.

Evil has only the power we give it.

I believe in creative failing - to contine to write poems that fail and fail and fail until a day comes when you've got a thousand poems behind you and you're relaxed and you finally write a good poem.

The Martians were there - in the canal - reflected in the water.... The Martians stared back up at them for a long, long silent time from the rippling water.

For if we're destroyed, the knowledge is dead...We're nothing more than dust jackets for books...so many pages to a person.