Writing is a lonely job. Even if a writer socializes regularly, when he gets down to the real business of his life, it is he and his type writer or word processor. No one else is or can be involved in...
Where history concerns mainly personalities, the drawings become either black or white according to the interests of the writer.
What do you require to exchange your ideas for mine? You think my convictions are for sale? Why not? came the cold response. Isn’t that your business, buying and selling? Only at a profit, said Mallow...
We mythologists know very well that myths and legends contain borrowings, moral lessons, nature cycles, and a hundred other distorting influences, and we labor to cut them away and get to what might b...
To [the government] it didn't matter what happened to the American people as long as america in the abstract was kept strong.
There is a longing for a supposedly simple and virtuous past that is almost universal among the people of a complex and vicious society.
The robot said, 'I have been trying, friend Julius, to understand some remarks Elijah made to me earlier. Perhaps I am beginning to, for it suddenly seems to me that the destruction of what should not...
The robot had no feelings, only positronic surges that mimicked those feelings. (And perhaps human beings had no feelings, only neuronic surges that were interpreted as feelings.)
The Library was outmoded and archaic—it had been so even in Ebling Mis's time—but that was all to the good. Pelorat always rubbed his hands with excitement when he thought of an old and outmoded Libra...
Oh, hell! I can’t sleep! Neither can I! But I might as well try—as a matter of principle. Twelve hours later, sleep was still just that—a matter of principle, unattainable in practice.
Night will always be a time of fear and insecurity, and the heart will sink with the sun.
I’m being accused of modesty, a horrible and thoroughly unnatural crime.
It's your fiction that interests me. Your studies of the interplay of human motives and emotion.
It was obvious that bigotry was never a one-way operation, that hatred bred hatred!
It is the invariable lesson to humanity that distance in time, and in space as well, lends focus.
In the empty expanses of space, the wandering traders need men like myself to care for the spiritual side of a life so given over to commerce, and worldly pursuits.
He was going mad and knew it, andsomewhere deep inside a bit of sanity was screaming, struggling to fight offthe hopeless flood of black terror. It was very horrible to go mad and knowthat you were go...
Grip the nettle firmly and it will become a stick with which to beat your enemy.
Even Magnifico was put to work on the calculating machine for routine computations, a type of work, which, once explained, was a source of great amusement to him and at which he was surprisingly profi...
Earthmen may even rule at Trantor for a generation, but their children will become Trantorians, and in their turn will look down upon the remnant on Earth.