Truth is stranger than fiction; fiction has to make sense.

Happiness comes only when we push our brains and hearts to the farthest reaches of which we are capable.

Courage is the capacity to confront what can be imagined.

The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can't help it.

Any man who hates dogs and babies can't be all bad.

We see things as we are, not as they are.

Words must surely be counted among the most powerful drugs man ever invented.

A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood.

Why did God give me two ears and one mouth? So that I will hear more and talk less.

Some things are so unexpected that no one is prepared for them.

Satire is focused bitterness.

Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.

A conservative is one who admires radicals centuries after they're dead.

Proverbs often contradict one another, as any reader soon discovers. The sagacity that advises us to look before we leap promptly warns us that if we hesitate we are lost; that absence makes the heart grow fonder, but out of sight, out of mind.

I learned that it is the weak who are cruel, and that gentleness is to be expected only from the strong.

Extremists think "communication" means agreeing with them.

The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others.

An angel is a spiritual creature created by God without a body for the service of Christendom and the church.

I never cease being dumbfounded by the unbelievable things people believe.

First-rate people hire first-rate people; second-rate people hire third-rate people.

If you are going to do something wrong at least enjoy it.

Truth is stranger than fiction; fiction has to make sense.

Extremists think 'communication' means agreeing with them.

Hope is ambiguous, but fear is precious.

A conservative is one who admires radicals centuries after theyre dead.

The purpose of life is not to be happy but to matter to be productive to be useful to have it make some difference that you have lived at all.

Machines certainly can solve problems, store information, correlate, and play games - but not with pleasure.

The purpose of life is not to be happy "but to matter, to be productive, to be useful, to have it make some difference that you lived at all.

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.

I have a kind of standard explanation why, which goes like this: Science fiction is one way of making sense out of a senseless world.

I'm not a great science fiction fan myself. I probably feel that way about Westerns. Like I used to play Cowboys and Indians, they can act out Will and the Robot.

A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.