Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful.

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.

The trouble with being educated is that it takes a long time; it uses up the better part of your life and when you are finished what you know is that you would have benefited more by going into banking.

This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance.

It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.

Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful.

Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error of judgment.

Don't try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night.

Reality is whatever refuses to go away when I stop believing in it.

I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist.

I am basically analytical, not creative; my writing is simply a creative way of handling analysis.

I am one of the elect, one of the few in the know, in the gnosis.

I dreamed: I am the fish whose flesh is eaten, and because I am fat, it is good.

I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards.

Strange how paranoia can link up with reality now and then.

The Martians are always coming.

The core of my writing is not art but truth.

The universe is information and we are stationary in it, not three dimensional and not in space or time.

We live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups. I ask, in my writing, 'What is real?' Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms.

When I believe, I am crazy. When I don't believe, I suffer psychotic depression.

Reality denied comes back to haunt.

We are living in a computer programmed reality and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed and some alteration in reality occurs. We have the overwhelming impression that we were reliving the present deja vu.

We live in a society where detachment is almost essential.

Drug misuse is not a disease it is a decision like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error of judgment.

The existence of a majority logically implies a corresponding minority.

The problem with introspection is that it has no end.

Sometimes the appropriate response to reality is to go insane.

He started keeping a journal - had been, in fact, secretly doing so for some time: the furtive act of a deranged person.

Madness has its own dynamism. It just goes on.

Matter is plastic in the face of Mind.

There is no route out of the maze. The maze shifts as you move through it, because it is alive.

We must content ourselves with the mystery, the absurdity, the contradictions, the hostility, but also the generosity that our environment offers us. It's not much, but it's always better than the deadly, defeatist certainty of the paranoid.

Skill is a function of chance. It's an intuitive best-use of chance situations.

No man is infinitely strong; for every creature that runs, flies, hops or crawls there is a terminal nemesis which he will not circumvent, which will finally do him in.

Men and the world are mutually toxic to each other.

If you think this Universe is bad, you should see some of the others.

It's easy to win. Anybody can win.

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.