The first writing I did was short short stories for a newspaper syndicate for which I was paid five dollars a piece on publication.

You have to study your field and you have to find out how other people do it, and you have to keep working and learning and practicing and ultimately, you would be able to do it.

There are a lot of people who write very intensely about things they do not and cannot do.

You don't sit up in a cave and write the Great American Novel and know it is utterly superb, and then throw it page by page into the fire. You just don't do that. You send it out. You have to send it out.

Once I had all the facts in, I found I didn't have the immoral courage to pull the caper. So I wrote it as a story. As a teenager, I didn't have any skills for writing as such, so it came out in 1500 words.

I quit my job, and went ashore to become a writer.

I wrote the very first stories in science fiction which dealt with homosexuality, The World Well Lost and Affair With a Green Monkey.

I learned how to live on five and sometimes ten dollars a week.

It should consist of short, sharply focused sentences, each of which is a whole scene in itself.

For years, I thought I simply didn't dream. I felt left out. Everybody else had a thing I didn't have.

I've always written very tightly, and there's a good reason for that. There's no point in using words that you're not going to apply.

In science fiction, you can also test out your own realities.

Some major writers have a huge impact, like Ayn Rand, who to my mind is a lousy fiction writer because her writing has no compassion and virtually no humor. She has a philosophical and economical message that she is passing off as fiction, but it really isn't fiction at all.

Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever.

I feel angry that I can't be hypnotized. I'm not putting it down, and I'm not saying that it doesn't exist. I have talked to a great many people who are very good at it, but so far nobody has ever been able to hypnotize me.

Anybody can do anything he wants to if he wants to do it badly enough.

As far as hypnosis is concerned, I had a very serious problem when I was in my twenties. I encountered a man who later became the president of the American Society of Medical Hypnosis. He couldn't hypnotize me.

Fiction is very important to me. It's what I do, it's what I do with my life.

I have lived most of my life with the conviction that I don't dream, because I never could retrieve a dream.

I teach writing courses and first of all, I teach my students what prosody is.

The first writing I did was short short stories for a newspaper syndicate for which I was paid five dollars a piece on publication.

Basically, fiction is people. You can't write fiction about ideas.

You must write to the people's expertise.

I find to my mixed astonishment that I do dream, but I didn't know it.

Ninety percent of everything is crap.

My wife is beginning to instruct me on means to retrieve dreams, and bit by bit, it does seem to be working.

There is no way of writing stories that I haven't done.

The story of my very first sale is the fact that I dreamed up a foolproof paper to cheat an insurance company out of several hundred thousand dollars.

There was so much that you could do, instead of looking for things that you couldn't do.

Inner space is so much more interesting, because outer space is so empty.

Create a world in which these things do or do not exist, or in which they are extended in some way. Test reality against this fiction. The reader will recognize the world that you're talking about, even though it may be another one altogether.

You write a story about loneliness, and you grab them all because everybody's an expert on that one.

As far as I'm concerned, I didn't dream - ever.

Writing is a communication.

I sent The World Well Lost to one editor who rejected it on sight, and then wrote a letter to every other editor in the field warning them against the story, and urging them to reject it on sight without reading it.

There are people who have tremendously important things to say, but they say it so poorly that nobody would ever want to read it.

I write a story as if it were a letter to someone and essentially, that's what you do.

When I can't do something, this always impels me to study it.

The movers and shakers have always been obsessive nuts.

Here's the point to be made - there are no synonyms. There are no two words that mean exactly the same thing.

When you combine something to say with the skill to say it properly, then you've got a good writer.

The principal rule of art is to please and to move. All the other rules were created to achieve this first one.

All enterprises that are entered into with indiscreet zeal may be pursued with great vigor at first, but are sure to collapse in the end.

Let me first state that I believe that marriage is a sacred union between one man and one woman.

Entropy theory is indeed a first attempt to deal with global form; but it has not been dealing with structure. All it says is that a large sum of elements may have properties not found in a smaller sample of them.

There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse.

The avantgarde are people who don't exactly know where they want to go, but are the first to get there.

I never taste the wine first in restaurants, I just ask the waiter to pour.

After the first miscarriage, I tried to take the attitude that it was my body's way of telling me that this pregnancy wasn't meant to be.