I don't think about what I do. I do it. That's Buddhism. I jump off the cliff and build my wings on the way down.

This is the emotional thing, you see - you must galvanize people, so they want to be completely alive and live forever, or the next thing to it. And out of that comes art, then, and survival through emotion.

I've grown up on a diet of metaphors. If young writers would find those writers who can give them metaphors by the bushel and the peck, then they'll become better writers - to learn how to capsualize things and present them in metaphorical form.

The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour.

I don't believe in colleges and universities.

To solve the drug problem, we have to start at the root - first grade. If a boy has all the toys in his head that reading can give him, and you hook him into science fiction, then you've got the future secured.

And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn't crying for him at all, but for the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again.