When you grow up in science fiction you grow up in everything! It's the greatest and only field worth growing up in. It's the total field.

You let the story cool off and then, instead of rewriting it, you relive it.

If you learn only methods, you'll be tied to your methods, but if you learn principles you can devise your own methods.

Stuff your eyes with wonder, live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.

You don't pay any attention to anything anyone else says, no opinions. The important thing is to explode with a story, to emotionalize a story, not to think it. You start thinking - the story's going to die on its feet.

There are too many of us, he thought. There are billions of us and that's too many. Nobody knows anyone. Strangers come and violate you. Strangers come and cut your heart out. Strangers come and take your blood. Good God, who were those men? I never saw them before in my life!

Venice was and is full of lost places where people put up for sale the last worn bits of their souls, hoping no one will buy.