If you know how to read, you have a complete education about life, then you know how to vote within a democracy. But if you don't know how to read, you don't know how to decide. That's the great thing about our country - we're a democracy of readers, and we should keep it that way.

The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour.

Anything you dream is fiction, and anything you accomplish is science, the whole history of mankind is nothing but science fiction.

And the lesson was this; sit in the sun, head down, within a prickly vine, in a flickery light, or open light, and the world will come to you. The sky will come in its time, bringing rain, and the earth will rise through you, from beneath, and make you rich and make you full.

Without the library, you have no civilization.

Most of my stories are ideas in action. In other words, I get a concept, and I let it run away. I find a character to act out the idea. And then the story takes care of itself.

Surprise is where creativity comes in.