What are the best things and the worst things in your life, and when are you going to get around to whispering or shouting them?

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!

And they were all, when their souls grew warm, poets.

The novel's not organized like a screenplay. If you shot the novel, you'd have a twelve-hour movie.

The very first experiments with building rockets and firing them off were carried out by students at Cal Tech in 1937, '38 and '39. And later these people put together these jet propulsion labs in Pasadena and wound up sending aircraft and spacecraft to the moon. So it all began very primitively with love.

The first stories I wrote when I was 12 were about Mars and landing on Mars.

Monday burn Millay, Wednesday Whitman, Friday Faulkner, burn 'em to ashes, then burn the ashes. That's our official slogan.