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.

Suggestion is a literary strategy.

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 only important elements in any society are the artistic and the criminal, because they alone, by questioning the society’s values, can force it to change.

The pleasures of love are really quite wonderful--though I suspect they are rather a luxury and require a certain level of socioeconomic stability to be anything other than a mode of suffering.

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

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