“I had casually rented an apartment that cost $75 a month because I expected my writing to pay my way.”

I first read science fiction in the old British Chum annual when I was about 12 years old.

The right to buy weapons is the right to be free.

I don’t recall having any self-awareness about the intricacy of my stories.

My theory was that what I had to do was make a study of human behavior.

It came about as follows: over the years when I was involved in dianetics, I wrote the beginnings of many stories. I would get an idea, and then write the beginning, and then never touch it again.

It’s difficult for me to feel that a solid page without the breakups of paragraphs can be interesting. I break mine up perhaps sooner than I should in terms of the usage of the English language.

I don’t recall having any self-awareness about the intricacy of my stories.

In a sense, there’s a great truth to that, but, also I was a great reader.

Recruiting Station was a story that came as the result of many anxious awakenings during many nights.

Science fiction is a field of writing where, month after month, every printed word implies to hundreds of thousands of people: ‘There is change. Look, today’s fantastic story is tomorrow’s fact.

The encouragement I got from Campbell was a quick check and praise. Once the Space Beagle was launched on its mission, it seemed natural for it to breed additional thoughts.

The future of humanity is uncertain, even in the most prosperous countries, and the quality of life deteriorates; and yet I believe that what is being discovered about the infinitely large and infinitely small is sufficient to absolve this end of the century and millennium.

And yet, unless my senses deceive me, the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere ‘modernity’ cannot kill.

A house cannot be made habitable in a day; and, after all, how few days go to make up a century.

I do not know when, but I know that many have come in this century to develop arts and sciences, sow the seeds of a new culture that will flourish, unexpected, sudden, just when the power is deluded into believing they have won.

For those [observations] that I made in Leipzig in my youth and up to my 21st year, I usually call childish and of doubtful value. Those that I took later until my 28th year [i.e., until 1574] I call juvenile and fairly serviceable.

He means to succeed, and a man who has centuries before him can afford to wait and to go slow.

We are the not the best informed as the events of the last sixty centuries.

In Charleston, more than elsewhere, you get the feeling that the twentieth century is a vast, unconscionable mistake.