It's odd how violence and humor so often go together, isn't it?

The truth is, it's not a great career move to create a readership and then, in effect, abandon them.

There's a unique bond of trust between readers and authors that I don't believe exists in any other art form; as a reader, I trust a novelist to give me his or her best effort, however flawed.

As for the depiction of the Catholic church, it's not meant to be a prediction.

But it's not just a game of finding literary references.

But I think, and hope, that the novels can be understood and enjoyed as science fiction, on their own terms.

I loved almost everything about being a teacher, but I was an unusual teacher.

Writing, I'm convinced, should be a subversive activity - frowned on by the authorities - and not one cooed over and praised beyond common sense by some teacher.

It started 25 years ago, when I was teaching elementary school in a small town in Missouri.

No one inspired me to write, but writer Harlan Ellison terrified me into getting published.

It's odd how violence and humor so often go together, isn't it?

It's one of the strangest attributes of this profession that when we writers get exhausted writing one thing, we relax by writing another.

Movie SF is, by definition, dumbed down - there have only been three or four SF movies in the history of film that aspire to the complexity of literary SF.

I knew that I wanted to be a writer even before I knew exactly what being a writer entailed.

As long as my sixth graders showed an average improvement of five years, the principal and district pretty much left me alone to create my own curriculum and teach whatever I wanted.

He loved the darkness and mystery of the Catholic service the tall priest strutting like a carrion crow and pronouncing magic in a dead language the immediate magic of the Eucharist bringing the dead back to life so that the faithful could devour Him and become Him the smell of incense and mystical chanting.

Power a currency that never went out of style.

Real life seldom structures a decent denouement.

The Great Change is when humankind accepts its role as part of the natural order of the universe instead of its role as a cancer.

In twentieth century Old Earth a fast food chain took dead cow meat fried it in grease added carcinogens wrapped it in petroleum based foam and sold nine hundred billion units. Human beings. Go figure.

A hero. You want to be one of those rare human beings who make history rather than merely watch it flow around them like water around a rock.

Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become.

The whole planet reeks of mysticism without revelation.

Prison always has been a good place for writers, killing, as it does, the twin demons of mobility and diversion.

Seduction was both a science and art, a blend of skill, discipline, proximity, and opportunity. Mostly proximity.

Those who ignore history's lessons in the ultimate folly of war are forced to do more than relive them, they may be forced to die by them.

Men live by intervals of reason under the sovereignty of humor and passion.

Humor can help you cope with the unbearable so that you can stay on the bright side of things until the bright side actually comes along.

It is the ability to take a joke, not make one, that proves you have a sense of humor.

What we're doing is fun - if you have any sense of humor at all!

You've got to have a sense of humor to keep your sanity.

I don't think I could ever do a network sitcom because the humor is often based on some trite circumstance. I don't want to be a part of a show where it's mostly about coming up with the jokes.

All my jobs have been with food in one way or another since 1948. My parents were in the hotel business, and I just loved the warm hearted people who worked so hard with such good humor.

You can turn painful situations around through laughter. If you can find humor in anything, even poverty, you can survive it.

The man with the real sense of humor is the man who can put himself in the spectator's place and laugh at his own misfortune.

Advertisers also know that humor can help bond us to their product.

I am a great believer that what makes our show different is the humor.

The comic is the perception of the opposite; humor is the feeling of it.

Through humor, you can soften some of the worst blows that life delivers. And once you find laughter, no matter how painful your situation might be, you can survive it.

Once we got over the origin story, we could really delve deeper into their lives and characters and angst. So this movie actually has more heart, more humor.

Incongruity, they say, is one of the main ingredients of humor. Maybe it's because everybody can feel superior to me. I honestly don't know.

I love Sell Out, I think it's great. I love the jingles. The whole thing as an album is a wonderful piece of work. The cover. Everything about it. It's got humor, great songs, irony.

In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.

I'm not for gratuitous nudity, but if there's humor, I don't have a problem.

It felt as if things were literally slipping through my fingers. Things were just streaming away from me. I lost my sense of humor. I'm still looking for that.

Robert Walker as Bruno was excellent. He had elegance and humor, and the proper fondness for his mother.

I'm not really big on slapstick humor. I like gentle humor.

But it also became the experience, or was the experience, of the writers who were attracted to this kind of humor. They're all men or women who come from the same kind of experience in their own lives.

Puns are a form of humor with words.