Life is a means of extracting fiction.

When rewriting, move quickly. It's a little like cutting your own hair.

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

The reason I was able to give up smoking was because of the computer. You couldn't lean a cigarette on a computer, like you could on a typewriter. So it just made it that much more difficult to smoke. So I quit.

If you couldn't tell the difference between what hurt and what didn't, you had no business being alive. You can't have any good times if you can't tell.

That's the great thing about literature -- it makes the world less lonely.

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!"