We need our Arts to teach us how to breathe

A good night sleep, or a ten minute bawl, or a pint of chocolate ice cream, or all three together, is good medicine.

You have to learn to take rejection not as an indication of personal failing but as a wrong address.

Time is so strange and life is twice as strange. You must promise me not to live to be too old, William. It if is at all convenient, die before you're fifty. It my take a bit of doing. But I advise this is simply because there is no telling when another Helen Loomis might be born. It would be dreadful, wouldn't it, if you lived on to be very very old and some afternoon in 1999 walked down Main street and saw me standing there, aged twenty-one, and the whole thing out of balance again?

Write a short story every week. It's not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.

The only good writing is intuitive writing. It would be a big bore if you knew where it was going. It has to be exciting, instantaneous and it has to be a surprise. Then it all comes blurting out and it’s beautiful. I’ve had a sign by my typewriter for 25 years now which reads, ‘DON’T THINK!’

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