You learn to live with your crazy enthusiasms which nobody else shares, and then you find a few other nuts like yourself, and they're your friends for a lifetime. That's what friends are, the people who share your crazy outlook and protect you from the world, because nobody else is going to give a damn what you're doing, so you need a few other people like yourself.

Most of my short stories are fantasy.

Lone at night, when I was twelve years old, I looked at the planet Mars and I said, 'Take me home!' And the planet Mars took me home, and I never came back. So I've written every day in the last 75 years. I've never stopped writing.

Love is easy, and I love writing. You can't resist love. You get an idea, someone says something, and you're in love.

Learning to let go should be learned before learning to get. Life should be touched, not strangled.

There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist/Unitarian, Irish/Italian/Octogenarian/Zen Buddhist, Zionist/Seventh-day Adventist, Women's Lib/Republican, Mattachine/FourSquareGospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme.

The home environment can undo a lot you try to do at school.