My gosh, if you’re going away, we got a million things to talk about! All the things we would’ve talked about next month, the month after! Praying mantises, zeppelins, acrobats, sword swallowers!

My personal telephone book is a book of the dead now. I'm so old. Almost all of my friends have died, and I don't have the guts to take their names out of the book.

I like to smell things and look at things, and sometimes stay up all night, walking, and watch the sun rise.

I don't like realism. We already know the real facts about li[fe], most of the basic facts. I'm not interested in repeating what we already know. We know about sex, about violence, about murder, about war. All these things, by the time we're 18, we're up to here. From there on we need interpreters. We need poets. We need philosophers. We need theologians, who take the same basic facts and work with them and help us make do with those facts. Facts alone are not enough. It's interpretation.

Every story I've written was written because I had to write it. Writing stories is like breathing for me; it is my life.

I can write faster on a typewriter than you can on a computer. I do 120 words a minute, and you can't do that on a computer.

I have fun with ideas; I play with them.