A book has got smell. A new book smells great. An old book smells even better. An old book smells like ancient Egypt.
All of us, no matter how we look born into this world, feel something like the Hunchback. It doesn’t matter if you have a beautiful face or not.
Americans are far more remarkable than we give ourselves credit for. We’ve been so busy damning ourselves for years. We’ve done it all, and yet we don’t take credit for it.
Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things.
Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me.After the explosion, I spent the rest of the day putting the pieces together.
Everything is generated through your own will power.
Facts are not interesting to me.
I don’t believe in colleges and universities.
I don’t have a computer. A computer’s a typewriter. I already have a typewriter.
I don’t see myself as a philosopher. That’s awfully boring.
I don’t tell anyone how to write and no one tells me.
I don’t try to describe the future. I try to prevent it.
I felt a bit bookish, cut off from life.
I hate all politics. I don’t like either political party. One should not belong to them – one should be an individual, standing in the middle. Anyone that belongs to a party stops thinking.
I have fun with ideas; I play with them.
I have my favorite cat, who is my paperweight, on my desk while I am writing.
I have spent my life going from mania to mania. Somehow it has all paid off.
I have total recall. I remember being born. I remember being in the womb, I remember being inside. Coming out was great.
I know you’ve heard it a thousand times before. But it’s true – hard work pays off. If you want to be good, you have to practice, practice, practice. If you don’t love something, then don’t do it.
I love all of the arts. I love motion pictures. I love stage. I love theater.
I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it’s better than college. People should educate themselves – you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I’d written a thousand stories.
I think the reason my stories have been so successful is that I have a strong sense of metaphor.
I think we’re doing a dreadful job of educating.
I used to take my short stories to girls’ homes and read them to them. Can you imagine the reaction reading a short story to a girl instead of pawing her?
I’m not a serious person, and I don’t like serious people.
I’m not in control of my muse. My muse does all the work.
Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I’m borrowing energy from the ideas themselves.
If God treats you well by teaching you a disastrous lesson, you never forget it.
If we listened to our intellect, we’d never have a love affair. We’d never have a friendship. We’d never go into business, because we’d be cynical. Well, that’s nonsense. You’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.
If you don’t like what you’re doing, then don’t do it.
If you dream the proper dreams, and share the myths with people, they will want to grow up to be like you.
If you enjoy living, it is not difficult to keep the sense of wonder.
If you know how to read, you have a complete education about life, then you know how to vote within a democracy. But if you don’t know how to read, you don’t know how to decide. That’s the great thing about our country – we’re a democracy of readers, and we should keep it that way.
If you’re living in your time, you cannot help but to write about the things that are important.
It’s lack that gives us inspiration. It’s not fullness.
It’s not going to do any good to land on Mars if we’re stupid.
Journalism keeps you planted in the earth.
Jump, and you will find out how to unfold your wings as you fall.
Libraries raised me.
Living at risk is jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down.
Love is easy, and I love writing. You can’t resist love. You get an idea, someone says something, and you’re in love.
Love is the answer to everything. It’s the only reason to do anything. If you don’t write stories you love, you’ll never make it. If you don’t write stories that other people love, you’ll never make it.
Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.
Most of my short stories are fantasy.
My business is to prevent the future.
My goal is to entertain myself and others.
My personal telephone book is a book of the dead now. I’m so old. Almost all of my friends have died, and I don’t have the guts to take their names out of the book.
My religion encompasses all religions. I believe in God, I believe in the universe. I believe you are god, I believe I am god; I believe the earth is god and the universe is god. We’re all god.
My stories run up and bite me on the leg – I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.
Once the automobile appeared you could have predicted that it would destroy as many people as it did.
Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.
Stuff your eyes with wonder, live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.
The answer to all writing, to any career for that matter, is love.
The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance – the idea that anything is possible.
The first stories I wrote when I was 12 were about Mars and landing on Mars.
The great fun in my life has been getting up every morning and rushing to the typewriter because some new idea has hit me.
The important thing is to be in love with something.
The major networks, the cable networks, they’re being prosecutors. They’re judges and jurors and executioners. Well, c’mon, that’s ridiculous. But they’re doing it.
There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
There is too much government today. We’ve got to remember the government should be by the people, of the people, and for the people.
Touch a scientist and you touch a child.
We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.
We are anthill men upon an anthill world.
We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.
We are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will. Incredible. The Life Force experimenting with forms. You for one. Me for another. The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts.
We have too many cellphones. We’ve got too many internets. We have got to get rid of those machines. We have too many machines now.
We’re all dreamers.
When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money.
When you’re older you want to learn from other people.
Why go to a machine when you could go to a human being?
Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.
You can’t try to do things; you simply must do them.
You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
You don’t have to turn on the TV set. You don’t have to work on the Internet. It’s up to you.
You don’t read in your own field. You read in that field when you’re young, so that you can learn.
You fail only if you stop writing.
You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.
You’ve got to jump off cliffs and build your wings on the way down.
