I quit my job, and went ashore to become a writer.

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

Ninety percent of everything is crap.

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'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.

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

Writing is a communication.