It's not going to do any good to land on Mars if we're stupid.

I don't see myself as a philosopher. That's awfully boring.

Write a short story every week. It's not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.

The trouble with Jim was he looked at the world and could not look away. And when you never look away all your life, by the time you are thirteen you have done twenty years taking in the laundry of the world.

Think of Shakespeare and Melville and you think of thunder, lightning, wind. They all knew the joy of creating in large or small forms, on unlimited or restricted canvases. These are the children of the gods.

These are all novels, all about people that never existed, the people that read them it makes them unhappy with their own lives. Makes them want to live in other ways they can never really be.

I'm being ironic. Don't interrupt a man in the midst of being ironic, it's not polite. There!