“Don’t ask your readers to admire your words when you want them to believe your story.”

Feeding the starving poor only increases their number.

A new space race has begun, and most Americans are not even aware of it. This race is not [about] political prestige or military power. This new race involves the whole human species in a contest against time.

Omni is not a science magazine. It is a magazine about the future…Omni was sui generis. Although there were plenty of science magazines over the years…Omni was the first magazine to slant all its pieces toward the future. It was fun to read and gorgeous to look at.

The problem is that Americans would like to be independent of the rest of the world … Except the world ain’t that way. Trying to be independent of the rest of the world is to commit suicide.

The Old Ones knew that life is not rare, but precious; not fragile, but vulnerable. Life is as deep as the seas in which it was born, as strong as the mountains that give it shelter, as universal as the stars themselves.

Red tape has killed more people than bullets.

My first published novel was written for teenagers, and there were rules laid down by the publisher: no sex, no smoking, no swearing. I blew up entire solar systems, I consigned billions of people to horrible death; they didn’t seem to mind that at all. But no hanky-panky.

As long as we’re tied to Middle Eastern oil we’re tied to Middle Eastern politics. We’re hostages to the terrorists and nutcases who want to wipe out Israel and the United States because we support Israel.

When I started understanding how science works, it occurred to me that there just is no evidence that there is a God.

I did not know if the story was factually true or not, but it was emotionally true […].

Although I’m up for working in any genre, I do love the passion and dynamic storytelling that horror stories can provide. Dealing with big questions and possibilities of all sorts of stories with life and death consequences is enthralling and exhilarating to me.

The most important part of a story is the piece of it you don’t know.

Telling the proper stories is as if you were approaching the throne of Heaven in a fiery chariot.

Never again shall a single story be told as though it were the only one.

Hope is a contraband passed from hand to hand and story to story.

It is not usually possible in a poem or a story to make the relationship between particular and universal fully explicit. Those who try to do so end up writing parables.

Travel stories teach geography; insect stories lead the child into natural science; and so on.