The progress of science, like an ancient desert trail, is strewn with the bleached skeletons of discarded theories, doctrines, and axioms which seemed to possess eternal life.

Courage is never to let your actions be influenced by your fears.

The jester is brother to the sage.

One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up.

The principle mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers.

The story of the Khazar Empire, as it slowly emerges from the past, begins to look like the most cruel hoax which history has ever perpetrated.

Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion.

Politics can be relatively fair in the breathing spaces of history; at its critical turning points there is no other rule possible than the old one, that the end justifies the means.

Creativity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.

In any language it is a struggle to make a sentence say exactly what you mean.

I believe that the evidence for telepathy is overwhelming and that it is a part of reality that is above science. Science allows us to glimpse [only] fragments of reality.

The problem in this world is that we have poetry but insist on living in prose.

Pain is a horribly wonderful gift.

It is the duty of Her Majesty's government neither to flap nor to falter.

What gets me pretty pissed off is the whole Monsanto engineered foods issue.

In vain we shall penetrate more and more deeply the secrets of the structure of the human body, we shall not dupe nature; we shall die as usual.

A lot of people don't like the road, but it's as natural to me as breathing.

I always let the characters guide the stories. They really let me know what they want to say and what action they want to happen.

Daydreaming had started me on the way; but story writing once I was truly in its grip, took me and shook me awake.

I don't have any degrees. I went to Hunter College one year and New York University another year. It's just on the basis of my books that I've been hired at any of the places I've been.

The art of genius is knowing how far out is too far.