I love biomedical science, I love astronomy, and you can't really do much with those in a fantasy setting.

You can also make explicit certain social problems which, again, would be prejudged or not encountered at all in real life, because people have set up defenses against it. Fantasy allows you to get past defenses.

I love biomedical science, I love astronomy, and you can't really do much with those in a fantasy setting.

One of my degrees was a science degree in biology.

I was writing fiction, but not finishing fiction.

I had, of course, no model for that sort of woman being married, but I can make that up as I go along.

But in fantasy, you can make a complete break, and you can put people in a situation where they are confronted with things that they would not confront in the real world.

Now my mother, interestingly enough, was not a feminist in her own mind.

Having a mother who had been an aeronautical engineer convinced me that more things should be open to women.

I like the Beatles, of course, but that's when I grew up.

In a novel, I could submerge my ego in a character's and let his perceptions take over.

I can become very emotional about math, although I'm not that good at it.

Hard to be a physics major at Rice University if you have flunked calculus.

I actually feel that the different kinds of stories come out of different parts of my brain.

When I was quite young, she was working in a hardware store, so I grew up knowing about hardware.

I've taught Sunday school, I've sung in the choir, I directed a choir.

When I was starting out, I did not do short fiction well, because I kept wanting to write books.

Other people, including me, have written books with main characters who were old and rich. Or old and brilliant. Old sages, old wizards, old rich people.

No, but a cello is the perfect string bass for an accordion. Works with it beautifully.

There are relatively few science fiction or fantasy books with the main character being an old person.

When a person responds emotionally to intellectual things, or emotionally only to traditional emotional things - I find that an interesting break between myself and some other writers and fans.

It may be far in the future, but there's some kind of logical way to get from where we are to where the science fiction is.

So when I got out of the military, I went back to school in biology, and earned a biology degree at the University of Texas, and then did some graduate work in it.

It's hard to hold the focus that strongly on a single character for that long.

My personal feeling about science fiction is that it's always in some way connected to the real world, to our everyday world.

I used to not back down from a challenge.

I regarded drugs as somewhat like rattlesnakes - it's possible to pick one up without getting bit, but why bother?

My first degree came years before my second. I had wanted to be a physicist, but I flunked calculus.

No but a cello is the perfect string bass for an accordion. Works with it beautifully.

Fantasy allows you to get past defenses.

But in fantasy you can make a complete break and you can put people in a situation where they are confronted with things that they would not confront in the real world.

I love biomedical science, I love astronomy, and you can't really do much with those in a fantasy setting.

We are probably nearing the limit of all we can know about astronomy.

But my most favourite pursuit, after my daily exertions at the Foundry, was Astronomy. There were frequently clear nights when the glorious objects in the Heavens were seen in most attractive beauty and brilliancy.

So far as hypotheses are concerned, let no one expect anything certain from astronomy, which cannot furnish it, lest he accept as the truth ideas conceived for another purpose, and depart from this study a greater fool than when he entered it.

But when researchers at Bell Labs discovered that static tends to come from particular places in the sky, the whole field of radio astronomy opened up.

Science Fiction is not just about the future of space ships travelling to other planets, it is fiction based on science and I am using science as my basis for my fiction, but it's the science of prehistory - palaeontology and archaeology - rather than astronomy or physics.

Astronomy teaches the correct use of the sun and the planets.

It is clear to everyone that astronomy at all events compels the soul to look upwards, and draws it from the things of this world to the other.

Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy; but after a war it seems more like astrology.

In 1959 the University recognized our work by appointing me to a new Chair of Radio Astronomy.

Astronomy's much more fun when you're not an astronomer.

It's like having astronomy without knowing where the stars are.

So fantasy was fine early on, and when I discovered science fiction, I was very happy with it, because my first interest in science fiction came with an interest in astronomy.

I turned my attention for a while to gamma ray astronomy and soon began the first in a continous series of experiments at the Savannah River site to study the properties of the neutrino.

Until very recently, the heavenly bodies have been investigated only with reference to their position and their laws of motion, and a quarter of a century ago astronomy was little more than celestial topography.

The history of astronomy is a history of receding horizons.

Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy the mad daughter of a wise mother. These daughters have too long dominated the earth.

I liked math - that was my favorite subject - and I was very interested in astronomy and in physical science.