It's very strange writing science fiction in a world that moves as fast as ours does.

There's a flipside to this; if you as an individual have the right to live on your own terms, you must have the right to both succeed and fail on them.

Writers, all the good ones, are Natural Born Liars.

If there is a substantial difference between a gay couple and a childless heterosexual couple, I'm unable to see it.

So, we, as human beings, live in a very imprecise world. A world where our perceptions of reality are far more important than actual reality.

An attempt to write nothing but characterization will soon bog down; I for one don't want to have somebody tell me about someone else.

There are, believe it or not, good politicians.

Before Watergate and Viet Nam, the American public, as a whole, believed everything it was told, and since then it doesn't believe anything, and both of those extremes hurt us because they prevent us from recognizing the truth.

Actors are good liars; writers are good liars with good memories.

It's your body and your life and you have an absolute right to do with it as you choose.

Well, the future of the Internet is... Reality.

You want to balance the budget in this country? We change the salary structure for Congress and the President. Every year they don't balance the budget, we don't pay them.

There's no way for me to know, but my best guess, as it must be for everyone, is that other people are pretty much like me.

The universe is not fair and it is never going to be fair.

To write well you must be willing to go naked into the world.

What the power structure is afraid of is that we're going to learn to recognize the truth when we hear it.

It's very strange writing science fiction in a world that moves as fast as ours does.

The welfare system in the United States is vile.

If a liberal political philosophy stands for anything, and I am no longer sure it does, then it must mean that we are committed to the leveling of the playing field for everyone.

The most interesting thing about the idea of money is that it makes it possible to measure something in previous ages we couldn't be sure about, and that something is power.

You can have data without information, but you cannot have information without data.

Plot and character are virtually the same thing.

There is virtually nothing I wouldn't be willing to do, to try and make sure that children have a fair shake in life.

The reason Ronald Reagan gets slammed for having so badly exacerbated the problem of deficit spending is that he so plainly deserves it.

The federal debt in this country is principally of Republican design.

As a fiscal conservative, I think that our government should pay for itself.

Our species is on the verge of changes that will fundamentally alter what it means to be human... and we are the people driving that change.

We are reinventing the world. We've set the ball spinning with little concern for where and how it's going to stop.

I'm a liberal where children are concerned, a libertarian where adults are concerned - and thinking very seriously about running for the House of Representatives, for whatever that's worth.

Police do not belong in war zones.

It's obvious, but perhaps worth saying, that happiness has virtually nothing to do with the state of your intellect.

I don't really have special rituals, but I don't try to write fiction unless I have a minimum of a few hours. For me, it takes a while to settle into a mode where I'm truly concentrating.

The fact that it's science fiction gives you the license to do anything you want to do.

For someone who writes fiction, in order to activate the imagination and the unconscious, it's essential to be free.

Fiction came quite a while later. I began with short stories and fiction for children.

Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.

I'd have been a filmmaker or a cartoonist or something else which extended from the visual arts into the making of narratives if I hadn't been able to shift into fiction.

For truth is always strange; stranger than fiction.

We were given clear concrete tools. The course did a great job demystifying the art of fiction writing and fostering confidence. The instructor brought complex concepts down to earth. I will miss coming here every week.

The biographies and autobiographies are on the whole more impressive than the fiction of the last two decades, but the freakish best sellers among them are least likely to withstand the test of time.

I have never been a critic of science fiction as a whole.

Fiction was invented the day Jonas arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale.

I think if I had been writing fiction, where the work is entirely dependent on the writer's creativity and the potential directions the narrative might take are infinite, I might have frozen.

I have always loved science fiction. One of my favorite shows is 'Star Trek.' I like the trips, where it drops my mind off, because they give you a premise and all of a sudden, you say, 'Oh!' and I'm fascinated by it.

I spent several years acquiring the obsessive, day-to-day discipline that's needed if you want to write professionally, then several more, highly valuable years studying fiction writing at the University of Iowa.

For people who have no critical acumen, a state is a mythical entity, for those who think critically it is a rational fiction, created by man in order to facilitate human coexistence.

There is an element of autobiography in all fiction in that pain or distress, or pleasure, is based on the author's own. But in my case that is as far as it goes.

For the last 30 years our cinemas have been ruled by science fiction and horror. We've had some very good Fantasy films in that time period, but for my tastes I still haven't seen fantasy done to absolute perfection. That is the hope I have in this project.

I dig science fiction, though it was never really my thing.