You write a story about loneliness, and you grab them all because everybody's an expert on that one.

Why must we love where the lightning strikes, and not where we choose?

Nothing is always absolutely so

You don't sit up in a cave and write the Great American Novel and know it is utterly superb, and then throw it page by page into the fire. You just don't do that. You send it out. You have to send it out.

Corollary 1: The existence of immense quantities of trash in science fiction is admitted and it is regrettable; but it is no more unnatural than the existence of trash anywhere.

I write a story as if it were a letter to someone and essentially, that's what you do.

Basically, fiction is people. You can't write fiction about ideas.