Readers, after all, are making the world with you. You give them the materials, but it's the readers who build that world in their own minds.

What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing.

Primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war.

We have been civilized for a thousand millennia. We have histories of hundreds of those millennia. We have tried everything. Anarchism, in all its forms, with the rest. But I have not tried it. They say there is nothing new under any sun. But if each life is not new, each single life, then why are we born?

Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.... Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying.... Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the novelists say. But they don't tell you what you will see and hear. All they can tell you is what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming, another third of it spent in telling lies.

Art is action. The way I live my life to its highest degree is by writing, the practice of art.

The airport bookstore did not sell books, only bestsellers, which Sita Dulip cannot read without risking a severe systemic reaction.