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.

For if we're destroyed, the knowledge is dead...We're nothing more than dust jackets for books...so many pages to a person.

Now that I have you thoroughly confused, let me pause to hear your own dismayed cry.

This was all he wanted now. Some signs that the immense world would accept him and give him the long time he needed to think all the things that must be thought.

My stories run up and bite me on the leg - I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.

If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape.

We're going to become the martians when we land there. When we explore and build communities, we become the martians. That's a wonderful destiny for all of us.