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

There are people who have tremendously important things to say, but they say it so poorly that nobody would ever want to read it.

Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever.

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.

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

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?

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.