I'd visit the near future, close enough that someone might want to talk to Larry Niven and can figure out the language; distant enough to get me decent medical techniques and a ticket to the Moon.

Ethics change with technology.

SF isn't a genre; SF is the matrix in which genres are embedded, and because the SF field is never going in any one direction at any one time, there is hardly a way to cut it off.

The human species really could have faced global thermonuclear war. During seventy years of Cold War we grew used to it.

Everything starts as somebody's daydream.

In the world of words the imagination is one of the forces of nature.

In hindsight it may even seem inevitable that a socialist society will starve when it runs out of capitalists.

You learn by writing short stories. Keep writing short stories. The money's in novels, but writing short stories keeps your writing lean and pointed.

We learn only to ask more questions.

It's very difficult for a black man to get out of South-Central Los Angeles, and get out civilized....The only men I know who have escaped, all began reading Robert Heinlein at age ten.

One mark of a good officer, he remembered, was the ability to make quick decisions. If they happen to be right, so much the better.

I will live each minute in gratitude.

They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn't. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.

Eugene V. Debs has always been one of my heroes.

After all my various relationships I find myself now home alone.

America's biggest failure is its inability to take comedy seriously.

For things to change, you have to change.

A guy like Scott [Robinson] plays the whole history of music on every instrument you've ever heard of. He's just kind of an unparalleled genius.

My feeling is that if any Republican was elected it would be almost a death knell for the species literally, just because of their attitude on climate change.

Marriage is about raising children. That's the purpose of the institution.

Focus on loving the life you have now in the body you’ve got!