When I can't do something, this always impels me to study it.

There are a lot of people who write very intensely about things they do not and cannot do.

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

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

If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?

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.

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.