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.

A good science fiction story is a story with a human problem, and a human solution, which would not have happened at all without its science content.

When you combine something to say with the skill to say it properly, then you've got a good writer.

I've always written very tightly, and there's a good reason for that. There's no point in using words that you're not going to apply.

Just think about it," he said softly. "You can do practically anything. You can have practically everything. And none of it will keep you from being alone." "Shut up shut up...Everybody's alone." He nodded. "But some people learn how to live with it.

There is in certain living souls a quality of loneliness unspeakable, so great it must be shared as company is shared by lesser beings. Such a loneliness is mine; so know by this that in immensity there is one lonelier than you.

Nothing is always absolutely so