I do think that short story writing is often a matter of luck.

I have never been a critic of science fiction as a whole.

I'm quite influenced in this by one of my heroes, Montaigne, who thought a man's real task was to render as honest an account of himself as he could.

I was forever reading outside of the field as well as in it.

I knew I was doing something right because it was selling so I didn't want to interfere with it.

I like to think that I have no single view nor any single situation that I think things arrive from. I try to give examples of what I think are interesting questions for me.

A lot of us don't want to be quite that serious about world problems. Our life is there to enjoy, not to be an eternal dissident, eternally unhappy with how things are and with the state of mankind.

So I wrote what I hoped would be science fiction, I was not at all sure if what I wrote would be acceptable even. But I don't say that I consciously wrote with humour. Humour is a part of you that comes out.

I don't finish every story, but I probably write and send out three out of five of them.

I'm not so interested any more in how a great deal of science fiction goes. It goes into things like Star Wars and Star Trek which all go excellent in their own way.

Science fiction is very healthy in its form.

There is a great deal of cyberpunk that I admire, especially the work of William Gibson which I think is excellent. Somehow he speaks from his own heart and cyber punk is what comes out.

Once you find you can't walk as far and as fast as you were able, life becomes more complicated.

I've always thought of absurdism as a French fad I'd like to belong to.

The absurdist stuff wasn't terribly popular at the time I was doing it.

It takes me a long time to get with a landscape. It took me 20 years before I wrote anything about Ibiza, and I haven't written about Oregon yet, although I've been there 20 years - possibly I'm almost due.

I'm not too fond of the hard work and the constant battle with self-doubt that goes on when I write, but I figure that's part of the territory.

I do think that short story writing is often a matter of luck.

I don't much like to look back with the idea that I was doing it wrong then or I'm doing it wrong now.

Ethical and questions of philosophy interest me a great deal.

As far as the mechanics go, working with other people on received ideas was for me a very interesting technical problem. I can't say that any of my collaborations engaged my heart, but they engaged the craftsman in me.

I was never able to write seriously about heroes because I was very aware that I was not one and that in my background there was not this heroic thing.

A novel is often a longer process in handling self-doubt.

A novel is often a longer process in handling self-doubt.

Luck is everything... My good luck in life was to be a really frightened person. I'm fortunate to be a coward, to have a low threshold of fear, because a hero couldn't make a good suspense film.

I still have horrible luck with girls.

How is it the great pieces of good luck fall to us?

With a little bit of luck, you'll never work!

The greatest luck that I've had has been the ability to find men and women who came into my administration who worked with me and brought extraordinary talents that we were able to take full advantage of.

So, it takes a lot of chance and luck. I mean I was lucky enough to get in the program where people with the same skills never made it to the program. So keep trying.

Be grateful for luck. Pay the thunder no mind - listen to the birds. And don't hate nobody.

Whoever has the luck to be born a character can laugh even at death. Because a character will never die! A man will die, a writer, the instrument of creation: but what he has created will never die!

I feel I'd like to share my luck and my life. Being in love is the best thing in the world.

Success is simply a matter of luck. Ask any failure.

I used to annoy my father by telling him how much I felt luck was with me.

People always call it luck when you've acted more sensibly than they have.

I have a musical called Goodbye and Good Luck, based on a Grace Paley short story. I also have King Island Christmas, and there are 20 different productions of it this year.

English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment and education - sometimes it's sheer luck, like getting across the street.

The deepest thing in any one is the conviction of the bad luck that follows boasting.

Care and diligence bring luck.

So it's probably eighty percent luck and twenty percent skill.

The people have spoken. Their decision is sovereign. We all respect it... I wish good luck to those who will now govern France.

I agree with Sophocles: the greatest luck is not to have been born - but, as the joke goes on, very few people succeed in it.

Luck's always to blame.

I had the luck that my parents educated me in three languages. With my mother I spoke Dutch, with my father Italian, and in the school I learned German. But my host language is Italian.

It was depressing, very depressing. I worried about how I would make a living. I didn't want to stay on the farm. It didn't offer the challenge I wanted and yet, without a college education, I felt that I was really out of luck.

The meeting of preparation with opportunity generates the offspring we call luck.

You gotta try your luck at least once a day, because you could be going around lucky all day and not even know it.

Give luck a chance to happen.