Science-fiction balances you on the cliff. Fantasy shoves you off.

I'm not anyone, I'm just myself; whatever I am, I am something, and now I'm something you can't help.

The very first experiments with building rockets and firing them off were carried out by students at Cal Tech in 1937, '38 and '39. And later these people put together these jet propulsion labs in Pasadena and wound up sending aircraft and spacecraft to the moon. So it all began very primitively with love.

It's rare you get an idea from a dream. I can't really recall a story that ever worked out that way. I think in 35 years of writing, that I've ever had a dream that held up. They're much too dislocated

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.

... bums on the outside, libraries inside.

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.