The hunger of a dragon is slow to wake, but hard to sate.

To have a choice at all is to be privileged.

What else can the young be? When you are on the bottom, you must organize from the bottom up

I certainly wasn't happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can't earn, and can't keep, and often don't even recognize at the time; I mean joy.

Fiction—and poetry and drama— cleanse the doors of perception.

...fiction is made out of the writer's experience, his whole life from infancy on, everything he's thought and done and seen and read and dreamed. But experience isn't something you go and get - it's a gift, and the only prerequisite for receiving it is that you be open to it. A closed soul can have the most immense adventures, go through a civil war or a trip to the moon, and have nothing to show for all that "experience"; whereas the open soul can do wonders with nothing.

Science fiction is not prescriptive; it is descriptive.