I learned how to live on five and sometimes ten dollars a week.

Here's the point to be made - there are no synonyms. There are no two words that mean exactly the same thing.

I teach writing courses and first of all, I teach my students what prosody is.

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.

The first writing I did was short short stories for a newspaper syndicate for which I was paid five dollars a piece on publication.

Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever. You can go not only into the future, but into that wonderful place called other, which is simply another universe, another planet, another species.

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.