We're basically after Joe's beer money, and Joe likes his beer, so you better make sure that what you give him is at least as pleasurable to him as having his six-pack of beer would be.

In any ethical situation, the thing you want least to do is probably the right action.

You see, I used to do a certain amount of market research by going to the local drugstore and seeing what the truck drivers would put up. Now it's all just copies from the latest best-seller list and damn little of anything else.

One the other hand, the publishing trend is ghastly, isn't it? Two hundred and something distributors are now down to 10 or 12? And what's the recruiting drive?

There were probably, what, 300 science-fiction members in the SFWA, of whom probably a hundred were active members in the sense that they were selling something every year, or every couple years.

I have more information in one place than anybody in the world.

The hard part of writing at all is sitting your ass down in a chair and writing it. There's always something better to do, like I've got an interview, sharpening the pencils, trimming the roses. There's always something better to do. Going to a writer's club?

To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection.

And in down times it shakes a lot of the bad SF out, a lot the stuff that was bought for literary reasons, which is neither entertaining nor great literature.

Heinlein never had a best-seller. Even, I think, with Stranger in a Strange Land, I don't think it was actually on the New York Times best seller list.

Because Tom Doherty and people like that are not stupid. If they could have streamlined their operation more to get more money out of it, they would have done it. It's not like they're a bunch of idiots.

I think it takes about a million words to make a writer. I mean that you're going to throw away.

We're basically after Joe's beer money, and Joe likes his beer, so you better make sure that what you give him is at least as pleasurable to him as having his six-pack of beer would be.

The importance of information is directly proportional to its improbability.

We do a hard fantasy as well as hard science fiction, and I think I probably single-handedly recreated military science fiction. It was dead before I started working in it.

You no longer have much in the way of knowing what to do in a big, epic novel about the future, because nobody knows what the hell is going to happen.

Somebody's always getting me to come lecture to their writing class, and I don't talk about writing at all, I talk about the business of making a living at this racket.

Asimov was the reason why we changed some rules in the SFWA, and I'm not convinced we changed it for the best.

I started in this racket in the early '70s, and when I was president of the Science Fiction Writers of America, of which I was like the sixth president, I was the first one nobody ever heard of.

And that's another piece of advice I'll give junior writers; when you get to the point where they take you to lunch, let the editor suggest where to go.

The Aztecs believe they started up in what's now New Mexico, and wandered for 10,000 years before they got down into where they are now, in Mexico City. That's a weird legend.

So, I guess the answer to your question is very few people can bring off a novel of the future because it's just so damn hard to make it look like the future.

Write a lot. And finish what you write. Don't join writer's clubs and go sit around having coffee reading pieces of your manuscript to people. Write it. Finish it. I set those rules up years ago, and nothing's changed.

And meanwhile, the storytellers like me and Anderson, Silverberg... we tell stories. People like them. They want to know how it comes out, they want to know what the ending is.

In any bureaucracy the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence and sometimes are eliminated entirely.

In any ethical situation the thing you want least to do is probably the right action.

You know, nobody eats in England. Three or four pints of English beer a night fills you. I can't say I'm very impressed with the food in America. it's all sort of bland. Like turkey sandwiches.

My parents would read those books to me as well but they used to make me starving when I was a kid because they were always eating ham sandwiches with the crusts off and drinking ginger beer.

I'd like to have a beer-holder on my guitar like they have on boats.

When we did the sign outside, we did not do the cigarette or the mug of beer because it was going to be outside. I wasn't sure if the city would object.

For drink, there was beer which was very strong when not mingled with water, but was agreeable to those who were used to it. They drank this with a reed, out of the vessel that held the beer, upon which they saw the barley swim.

I'm a meat girl and I just love having a beer.

The goal is to give people a free encyclopedia to every person in the world, in their own language. Not just in a 'free beer' kind of way, but also in the free speech kind of way.

I learned early to drink beer, wine and whiskey. And I think I was about 5 when I first chewed tobacco.

Some people wanted champagne and caviar when they should have had beer and hot dogs.

I drank beer, and I had a career year.

Black music has become a commercial commodity. Live performances are not so accessible as they were previously. It use to be possible to go to the bar on the corner and hear music. It was available for a fifteen cent beer.

I would change policy, bring back natural grass and nickel beer. Baseball is the belly-button of our society. Straighten out baseball, and you straighten out the rest of the world.

Yes, sir. I'm a real Southern boy. I got a red neck, white socks, and Blue Ribbon beer.

I doing casual labor by the day. They wouldn't pay you until the next morning. There was a bar that would cash your check if you bought a beer first. A lot of guys never left until they'd drunk up all their money.

Milk is for babies. When you grow up you have to drink beer.

We didn't have a garage to rehearse in. We had to aggravate the folks in the house. But I got a chance to play in a beer joint, and that's how it started.

There is no such thing as a bad beer. It's that some taste better than others.

I'm an old-fashioned guy... I want to be an old man with a beer belly sitting on a porch, looking at a lake or something.

For the second straight year, craft beer is the fastest growing segment of the U.S. alcoholic beverage industry. In 2005, craft beer experienced a 9 percent increase in volume, nearly triple that of the growth experienced in the wine and spirits industry.

I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper and the old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer.

I sat backstage and had a beer with Richard Chamberlain, Paul Newman, and Princess Grace.

Very intense first summer out, to be 18 years old and never having gone on a date, never having smoked a cigarette, never had a drink, even a sip of beer, never kissed a girl, all of those things. It made for a fairly intense first year out.

The big compliment came from the beer drinkers who didn't know me. They wouldn't drink or move when I sang. If they had their glasses in mid-air, the glasses wouldn't come down.