What should I do?" "Throw up in your typewriter every morning." "Yeah." "Clean up every noon.

Through lack of education, we're not teaching kids to read and write. So there is the danger that you raise up a generation of morons.

When you grow up in science fiction you grow up in everything! It's the greatest and only field worth growing up in. It's the total field.

Science fiction is the most important literature in the history of the world, because it's the history of ideas, the history of our civilization birthing itself. ...Science fiction is central to everything we've ever done, and people who make fun of science fiction writers don't know what they're talking about.

I don't think the robots are taking over. I think the men who play with toys have taken over. And if we don't take the toys out of their hands, we're fools.

I have something to fight for and live for; that makes me a better killer. I've got what amounts to a religion now. It's learning how to breathe all over again. And how to lie in the sun getting a tan, letting the sun work into you. And how to hear music and how to read a book. What does your civilization offer?

I'm not really dying today. No person ever died that had a family. I'll be around a long time. A thousand years from now, a whole township of my offspring will be biting sour apples in the gumwood shade.