I like to be surprised. Fresh implications and plot twists erupt as a story unfolds. Characters develop backgrounds, adding depth and feeling. Writing feels like exploring

You don't have conversations with microprocessors. You tell them what to do, then helplessly watch the disaster when they take you literally!

When it comes to privacy and accountability, people always demand the former for themselves and the latter for everyone else.

It is said that power corrupts, but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power.

The village is coming back, like it or not.

In all of history, we have found just one cure for error—a partial antidote against making and repeating grand, foolish mistakes, a remedy against self-deception. That antidote is criticism.

Why must conversions always come so late? Why do people always apologize to corpses?

If you believe you can make a living as a writer, you already have enough ego.

The worst mistake of first contact, made throughout history by individuals on both sides of every new encounter, has been the unfortunate habit of making assumptions. It often proved fatal.

My first duty to write a gripping yarn. Second is to convey credible characters who make you feel what they feel. Only third comes the idea.

But honestly, if you do a rigorous survey of my work, I'll bet you'll find that biology is a theme far more often than physical science.

There is an intentional disregard for human health and safety in many government agencies that are tasked with protecting it.

compressed into boxes, packed in sawdust, ... trussed up in sacks, roped up like hams...

I took a month long vacation in the stratosphere, and you know it's very hard to hold your breath.

I am no longer going to go along with this idea that we're going to keep spending and borrowing and taking over and raising taxes, that I'm going to do everything I can to change things.

Not Truth, but Faith it is that keeps the world alive.

You have to always physicalize, when you do animation recording. Otherwise, you won't get the performance right.

Friends don't need the intervention of a third party. Friendship's a voluntary thing.

Heed the spark or you may dread the fire.

To dread no eye and to suspect no tongue is the great prerogative of innocence--an exemption granted only to invariable virtue.

Each generation takes a special pleasure in removing the household gods of its parents from their pedestals, and consigning them to the cupboard.