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.

There's no use going to school unless your final destination is the library.

I define science fiction as the art of the possible. Fantasy is the art of the impossible.

I am a librarian. I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library. Before I fell in love with libraries, I was just a six-year-old boy. The library fueled all of my curiosities, from dinosaurs to ancient Egypt. When I graduated from high school in 1938, I began going to the library three nights a week. I did this every week for almost ten years and finally, in 1947, around the time I got married, I figured I was done. So I graduated from the library when I was twenty-seven. I discovered that the library is the real school.

I'm scared of myself. I think I'd be a bad driver. I'm scared of cars, period. I've had too many friends killed now, and I've seen too many people killed in my life when I drove across the country when I was 12. I'm sure that has a lot to do with it. If you see a few real dead bodies with brains on the pavement, it does a lot to change your attitude. It means you can get it too. I've had a lot of relatives killed. I've had a lot of dear friends killed. It's stupid. The whole activity is stupid.

I don’t write things to benefit the world. If it happens that they do, swell. I didn’t set out to do that. I set out to have a hell of a lot of fun.

But you can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them. It can't last.