"Romanticizing the past" is a familiar accusation, made mostly by people who think it is more grown-up to romanticize the future.

We like to think that the fate of the Earth and the fate of human worlds are the same thing, but we're not as important as that.

In most novels, the landscape, or the place, in which the story takes part is simply a backdrop to the human action.

Hope, like despair, is something of a distraction: it gets in the way of a clear view of the horizon.

I think we take the history we want to take in order to back up the stories we want to hear.

The world we are in today is likely to end catastrophically, as many other human worlds have done before.

A man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest. I think that kind of thing is an abuse of history.

It's always hard for an author to determine his own intentions, especially in retrospect.

Poetry is like passion--it should not be merely pretty

Hey, I'm just looking for an excuse to retire so I can play summer league baseball, go coach my nephews, play pickup basketball. I've always had that ability to move on to the next thing.

I believe in nonfat. I gain two pounds when I eat a lamb chop.

Not a breath of air stirred over the free and open prairie; the clouds were like light piles of cotton; and where the blue sky was visible, it wore a hazy and languid aspect.

[When people] say 'let's do something about it,' they mean 'let's get hold of the political machinery so that we can do something to somebody else.' And that somebody is invariably you.

Nothing is to be presumed on, or despaired of.

I studied chemical engineering. I was a good student, but these were the hard times of the depression, my scholarship came to an end, and it was necessary to work to supplement the family income.

Being a comedian, people tell me stuff they shouldn't tell their therapist.

For some reason I am one of those people who act like they were born and raised during the Depression.

Discipline is the long and arduous process of convincing the mind to abide by one's conscience.