God, our genes, our environment, or some stupid programmer keying in code at an ancient terminal - there's no way free will can ever exist if we as individuals are the result of some external cause.

The most important training, though, is to experience life as a writer, questioning everything, inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that, all the other things will come; if you don't, there's no hope for you.

I have lived in the only decades I could have lived in, and hope to live through at least a few more.

My favourite all-time work of fiction: Lord of the Rings. My favourite all-time nonfiction book: Guns, Germs, and Steel. Ask me again next week, you'll get a different answer.

I am especially grateful, however, to have known the fifties, before we began to poison our own civilization - or at least before the effects of the poison began to be felt.

I fell into playwriting accidentally, took some classes in it, and also took creative writing classes, but I really didn't expect it to be a career because I didn't believe there was a way to make money as a playwright without being lucky and I didn't feel particularly lucky.

Writing sessions can last an hour or sixteen hours, depending on how it's going.

I wonder sometimes if the motivation for writers ought to be contempt, not admiration.

My college training was primarily in theatre, with an eye to becoming a director, actor, or producer.

The priests say that God created our souls, and that just puts us under the control of another puppeteer. If God created our will, then he's responsible for every choice we make.

The lies we live will always be confessed in the stories that we tell.

I hope I am remembered by my children as a good father.

Ulysses, obviously. It was an elaborate prank, and our supposed intellectual elite continue to fall for it.

One mind can think only of its own questions; it rarely surprises itself.

Working is hard and distracts from having fun.

Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.

Your work is first, learning is first, winning is everything because without it there is nothing.

Everything important in sci-fi showed up in the magazines first. It's the proving ground for new writers and new ideas.

There is more good writing and good acting in any ten minutes of Twister than in, say, all of Citizen Kane.

Of course, I also hear from critics who detest what I do, and while sometimes I feel rather proud of having made various the loathsome people or groups angry, at other times I wonder why I put up with such grief.

I buy way too many books.

I don't believe that there are aliens. I believe there are really different people.

As long as you keep getting born, it's alright to die some times.

I listen to music constantly while writing.

I say this as a Democrat, for whom the Republican domination of government threatens many values that I hold to be important to America's role as a light among nations. But there are no values that matter to me that will not be gravely endangered if we lose this war.

I realized that everything important in sci-fi showed up in the magazines first. It's the proving ground for new writers and new ideas.

Unemployment is capitalism's way of getting you to plant a garden.

You who speak languages, you are such liars.

The education that prepared me was my general education classes, which I tried to avoid when I was a stupid undergraduate, but which gave me the foundation of general knowledge that makes a career as a writer possible.

God, our genes, our environment, or some stupid programmer keying in code at an ancient terminal - there's no way free will can ever exist if we as individuals are the result of some external cause.

In all my study of history, I have never found a time or place I would rather have lived than now.

In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him.

It's the middle class that feels the luxury of being able to have causes.

But in the meantime I became accustomed to the writing life and it would be hard to change now - partly because of the salary cut if I went to my other love, teaching; and partly because I still have stories to tell, even though it isn't all that fun doing the work anymore.

Among my most prized possessions are words that I have never spoken.

Laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books.

The best thing about my job, though, is stopping at the end of the day and rejoining the human universe.

There's a reason why every human society has fiction. It teaches us how to be 'good,' to behave in a way that is for the benefit of the whole community.

There's a reason why every human society has fiction. It teaches us how to be 'good', to behave in a way that is for the benefit of the whole community.

Anthropology is never an exact science; the observer never experiences the same culture as the participant.

The thing with brothers is youre supposed to take turns being the keeper. Sometimes you get to sit down and be the brother who is kept.

The only people who think children are carefree are the ones whove forgotten their own childhood.

The commercial work of today is the classics of tomorrow.

Every person is defined by the communities she belongs to.

Computers were a kind of magery in themselves or might as well be to people who didnt understand them they were every bit as inscrutable.

It is the downfall of evil that it never sees far enough ahead.

For he loved her as you can only love someone who is an echo of yourself at your time of deepest sorrow.

If a father commands a son to commit a crime so terrible that the son cant do it and live with himself then is it betrayal for the son to disobey his father

A regime that wraps itself in the flag of truth fears truth most of all for if its story is falsified to the slightest degree its authority is gone.