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'll be damned if death wears my sadness for glad rags.

...passing swiftly on toward further darknesses, but moving also toward a new sun.

You don't organize metaphors . . . you explode them.

I was not predicting the future, I was trying to prevent it.

Space travel is life-enhancing, and anything that's life-enhancing is worth doing. It makes you want to live forever.

Libraries are absolutely at the center of my life. Since I couldn't afford to go to college, I attended the library three or four days a week from the age of eighteen on, and graduated from the library when I was twenty-eight.