If things are going well, if the writing's coming along, I jump out of bed happy. And if the previous day has been bad, I get out of bed disgruntled.

We're taught Lord Acton's axiom: all power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. I believed that when I started these books, but I don't believe it's always true any more. Power doesn't always corrupt. Power can cleanse. What I believe is always true about power is that power always reveals.

The right of a minority is so important in a democracy.

The Senate is an unknowing world

As you get older, you sometimes feel that it's harder and harder to get something new and wonderful to come into your life.

You come in off the street, through the doors of the theater. You sit down. The lights go down and the curtain goes up. And you're in another world

You can lose a reader in a blink of an eye. If a person is an engineer or chemist or an anthropologist or whatever, you spoil the whole book for that person if there's obviously ignorance here. What's wrong with so much science fiction is that the science is so lousy that it isn't worth paying attention to.