It is easier to argue that something nobody believes in actually exists than it is to argue that something everybody believes in is unreal.

I took my writing seriously, and it seemed to pay off.

Science fiction doesn’t try to predict the future, but rather offers a significant distortion of the present…We sit around and look at what we see around us and we say how can the world be different

The reason for privacy is not so that people will not know you go to the bathroom. It's to allow certain things to go on that you don't want other people to know about, when all is said and done. But the things I don't want other people to know about are not my sex life.

From 1968 on, I was pretty much the black, gay SF writer.

The poems ... are moments when I had the intensity to see, and the energy to build, some careful analog that completed the seeing. ... All I have been left is the exhausting habit of trying to tack up the slack in my life with words.

Discourse says, 'You are.' Rhetoric preserves the freedom to say, 'I am not.