To me, fantasy has always been the genre of escape, science fiction the genre of ideas. So if you can escape and have a little idea as well, maybe you have some kind of a cross-breed between the two.

The practice of diplomacy, I have found, is sometimes like eating soup with a fork: much activity yielding little nourishment.

All around the Mediterranean you'll find cultures that believe men can't control themselves and shouldn't have to try.

We live in a time like dreaming.... The edges of our lives flutter and change as we watch them. Listen to the dream.

Do you realize it’s been only a century that we’ve been able to go from house to car to office to car to wherever, with the heater on, and the defroster on, protected from the rain and the cold? It hasn’t been much longer than that we’ve had lighting for streets. Think of all that darkness, all that world out there, all that mystery that we’ve turned into well-lighted concrete bunkers, safe and warm and dull.

Mankind accepts good fortune as his due, but when bad occurs, he thinks it was aimed at him, done to him, a hex, a curse, a punishment by his deity for some transgression, as though his god were a petty storekeeper, counting up the day's receipts.

The only people who have the long view are some scientists and some science fiction writers.