I have four daughters and eight grandchildren. My soul lives on in them. That's immortality. That's the only immortality I care about.

A reason I became a writer was to escape the hopelessness and despair of the real world and enter the world of hope I could create with my imagination.

Libraries are absolutely at the center of my life. Since I couldn't afford to go to college, I attended the library three or four days a week from the age of eighteen on, and graduated from the library when I was twenty-eight.

From now on I hope always to educate myself as best I can. But lacking this, in future I will relaxedly turn back to my secret mind to see what it has observed when I thought I was sitting this one out. We never sit anything out.

Science fiction is really sociological studies of the future, things that the writer believes are going to happen by putting two and two together.

We should have stayed on the moon. We should have made moon the base, instead of building space stations, which are fragile and which fly apart.

You either have an imaginative mind or you don't. All of my writing is God-given. I don't write my stories - they write themselves.