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

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.

Without feeling abashed by my ignorance, I confess that I am absolutely unable to say. In the absence of an appearance of learning, my answer has at least one merit, that of perfect sincerity.

Words are the children of reason and, therefore, can't explain it. They really can't translate feeling because they're not part of it. That's why it bugs me when people try to analyze jazz as an intellectual theorem. It's not. It's feeling.

The best compliment to a child or a friend is the feeling you give him that he has been set free to make his own inquiries, to come to conclusions that are right for him, whether or not they coincide with your own.

The feeling remains that God is on the journey, too.

I've always wanted to sing, just as I've always known that one day I would have my own niche in the annals of song. It was a feeling I had.

The methods of peace propaganda which aim at establishing peace doctrine by argument and by creating a feeling favorable to peace in general seem to fall short of reaching the springs of human action and of dealing with the causes of the conduct which they seek to modify.

I love making people laugh. It's an addiction and it's probably dysfunctional, but I am addicted to it and there's no greater pleasure for me than sitting in a theater and feeling a lot of people losing control of themselves.

Then came the choreography... the impact of music and choreography tends to really emphasize an overall feeling of what you really want out of the program.

On that road of the informer, it is always night. I cannot ever inform against anyone without feeling something die within me. I inform without pleasure, because it is necessary.

I was as big as I have ever been. I had a personal trainer and was working out. I was feeling good. I was muscular. I had never weighed more than 155 pounds.

Lately, I can't shake the feeling that I've been living a dream for the last 10 years or so; I can't account for most of my 20s, and I have to continually remind myself that certain people are dead now and many of my friends have children.

The key to the mystery of a great artist is that for reasons unknown, he will give away his energies and his life just to make sure that one note follows another... and leaves us with the feeling that something is right in the world.

Collectively, we must do more than simply watch, with resignation and a feeling of powerlessness, reports on the evening news about the latest terrorist atrocity.

But even if I'm left high and dry at the end of this wild journey, just taking it is a great feeling.

For me concrete poetry was a particular way of using language which came out of a particular feeling, and I don't have control over whether this feeling is in me or not.

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

You know that day after day of, Oh God what am I going to do with myself feeling? The fear of the emptiness that it implies keeps me going.

But I remember feeling as a producer I felt like the guy who called the caterer and got the band; I had to work the party while everybody else was having a good time.