Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.

If you write a hundred short stories and they're all bad, that doesn't mean you've failed. You fail only if you stop writing.

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

I discovered very early on that if you wanted a thing, you went for it - and you got it. Most people never go anywhere, or want anything - so they never get anything.

A book has got to smell. You have to hold it in your hands and pray to it.

I'm not a science-fiction writer. I've only written one book that's science fiction, and that's Fahrenheit 451. All the others are fantasy.

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!