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

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

All too often, when creative people pick out someone else's creative work as an inspiration, what they end up with is very, very far from the original.

There is no articulate resonance. The common problem, I suppose, is to have more to say than vocabulary and syntax can bear. That is why I am hunting in these desiccated streets. The smoke hides the sky's variety, stains consciousness, covers the holocaust with something safe and insubstantial. It protects from greater flame. It indicates fire, but obscures the source. This is not a useful city. Very little here approaches any eidolon of the beautiful.

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.

Linguistics is very much a science. It's a human science, one of the human sciences. And it's one of the more interesting human sciences.

The General Public is a statistical fiction created by a few exceptional men to make the loneliness of being exceptional a little easier to bear.