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

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.

A man must be strong in that profession, he must have vigor of body and mind, yet I am all out of breath if I walk up a hill; I have not the heart to crush even a fly.

The Epistle is a correction of profession without life, and most valuable in this respect.

They must have a feeling of do or die. It is such an overcrowded profession.

I'll be damned if I am not getting tired of this. It seems to be the profession of a President simply to hear other people talk.

Acting is the perfect idiot's profession.

Reality is, I'm an actor and an entertainer, and I really wouldn't know what to do with another profession.

I think one of the greatest joys I have now in my career and in my profession is to be playing at an age where I can appreciate it more than I used to... It's a whole different lens you look through the older you get.

My parents and grandparents have always been engaged in teaching or the medical profession or the priesthood, so I've sort of grown up with a sense of complicity in the lives of other people, so there's no virtue in that; it's the way one is raised.

We have indeed at the moment little cause for pride: as a profession we have made a mess of things.

Twenty years ago I wanted to move to a nice place so our Charley would grow up a nice boy and learn a profession. But instead we live in a jungle, so he can only be a wild animal. D'you think I picked the East Side like Columbus picked America?

Politics I supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.

Acting is the most brotherly and sisterly profession in the world.

When I joined the band, being that I was going to take this up as a profession, I realized that there were no two finer guitar players in the world that I'd rather play with.

In Hungary acting is a profession. In America it is a decision.

Journalism is a kind of profession, or craft, or racket, for people who never wanted to grow up and go out into the real world.

Never the less, at the age of fifteen, having never seen a writer, a poet, a publisher or a magazine editor, and having only the vaguest ideas of procedure, I began working on the profession I had chosen.

One of the big draws of the show is here's a guy who is ordinary in a lot of ways but, due to his profession, he's placed in extraordinary situations that he has to make right with action and with thought. That's what is appealing about Jack - he takes charge.

Politics, as a practice, whatever its profession, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.

The development of the comedy club industry destroyed the uniqueness and intimacy of the profession but it also created jobs for comics and bred some great performers.

I am deeply interested in the progress and elevation of journalism, having spent my life in that profession, regarding it as a noble profession and one of unequaled importance for its influence upon the minds and morals of the people.

Admittedly, scientific authority is not distributed evenly throughout the body of scientists; some distinguished members of the profession predominate over others of a more junior standing.

The University of North Carolina provided me with every tool necessary to rise to the top of my profession.

I never thought I would live long enough to see the legal profession change to the extent it has.