You don't want to depend on an editor. If you want to regret something for the rest of your life, you want to make sure you're responsible for it.

The things that you know more about than you want to know are very useful.

At the time, acid made me consider questions of reality, the difference, as someone said, between words and silence. It also brought back a lot of latent religious feelings in me that I had turned my back on.

I try very hard to be fair, and I look for ironies. In a way, I live on ironies as a novelist.

You should let dialogue get as nearly out of control as you can. Characters should say what they say to each other instead of what they mean to say. The worst purpose of dialogue is to elicit information: "You know why we're out on this space station, Carruthers - to save the universe!"

I think there's a necessity for some attachment to the spiritual world and, in a way, people really have to have it.

I was a radioman when I first went into the Navy, so I learned to type by taking Morse code. So I was using the typewriter from day one. My handwriting wasn't any good anyway.