Some major writers have a huge impact, like Ayn Rand, who to my mind is a lousy fiction writer because her writing has no compassion and virtually no humor. She has a philosophical and economical message that she is passing off as fiction, but it really isn't fiction at all.

Inner space is so much more interesting, because outer space is so empty.

The novels were all right for a while until she found out that most of them were like the movies - all about the pretty ones who really own the world.

Why on earth do you carry a mirror around with you?” “It's purely a defensive device. We seldom quarrel, and this is one of the reasons. Can you imagine yourself getting all worked up and contorted and illogical and then coming face to face with yourself, looking at yourself exactly as you look to everyone else?

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.

Fiction is very important to me. It's what I do, it's what I do with my life.

I wrote the very first stories in science fiction which dealt with homosexuality, The World Well Lost and Affair With a Green Monkey.