My personal feeling about science fiction is that it's always in some way connected to the real world, to our everyday world.

I love biomedical science, I love astronomy, and you can't really do much with those in a fantasy setting.

There are relatively few science fiction or fantasy books with the main character being an old person.

Normal' is a dryer setting.

I regarded drugs as somewhat like rattlesnakes - it's possible to pick one up without getting bit, but why bother?

There is simple ignorance, not knowing, and willful ignorance that refuses to know, that covers the light of knowledge with the dark blanket of bias.

It may be far in the future, but there's some kind of logical way to get from where we are to where the science fiction is.

So when I got out of the military, I went back to school in biology, and earned a biology degree at the University of Texas, and then did some graduate work in it.

My first degree came years before my second. I had wanted to be a physicist, but I flunked calculus.

Hard to be a physics major at Rice University if you have flunked calculus.

I've taught Sunday school, I've sung in the choir, I directed a choir.

Learning without action is like wax without honey.(Anwar-i-Suhaili)

Nothing is less important than which fork you use. Etiquette is the science of living. It embraces everything. It is ethics. It is honor.

I rarely ever put my head above the rampart and see where this big lumbering behemoth called 'global literature' is going.

God reigns when we take a liberal view, when a liberal view is presented to us.

Every journalist owes tribute to the evil one.

For we must bear in mind that the greater number of garden pictures known to us are taken from tombs.

You are wise as well as short." "I can also break bricks with my bare hands." "That's a handy skill if you ever find yourself walled up in the basement of an abandoned house by a psychopath.

For those of you who like to scarf your popcorn in the sack, the good news is that Newman's Own contains an aphrodisiac.

Performing music is a way to do comedy, but without the obligation to do a solid hour, hour and half of a standup. I could intersperse it with music, so it became a really good format for me.

The apple tree never asks the beech how he shall grow, nor the lion, the horse, how he shall take his prey.