What were we doing here? Traveling hundreds or thousands of light-years, to break our hearts?

The science fiction method is dissection and reconstruction.

A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.

You can't really predict the future. All you can do is invent it.

My old English buddy, John Rackham, wrote and told me what made science fiction different from all other kinds of literature - science fiction is written according to the science fiction method.

My first thought was always a cigarette. It still is, but I haven't cheated.

It's clear that science and science fiction have overlapping populations.

That's what life is, just one learning experience after another, and when you're through with all the learning experiences you graduate and what you get for a diploma is, you die.

For someone to be taken seriously it was valuable to have the appearance of someone who deserved to be taken seriously.

I did that for 40 years or more. I never had any writer's block. I got up in the morning, sat down at the typewriter - now, computer - lit up a cigarette.

I'm doing a book, 'Chasing Science,' about the pleasures of science as a spectator sport.

The glorious riches of God are inexhaustible.

May the Lord protect and keep you safe.

All human wisdom is summed up in two words - wait and hope.

I had a career at home, and I just knew that it'd be okay if nothing happened in Los Angeles.

Non-cooperation is a measure of discipline and sacrifice, and it demands respect for the opposite views.

Intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance.

The argument that resistance to the war should remain strictly nonviolent seems to me overwhelming.

A little bit of mercy makes the world less cold and more just.

That is because at the close of the day the ship we sail in is the soul, not the body.

It is as easy to count atomies as to resolve the propositions of a lover.