It was very lucky for me as a writer that I studied the physical sciences rather than English. I wrote for my own amusement. There was no kindly English professor to tell me for my own good how awful...
Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself. But mankind wasn't always so lucky. Less than a century ago, men and women did not have easy access to the puzzle boxes within them.
I am honorary President of the American Humanist Society, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that utterly functionless capacity. We Humanists behave as well as we...
Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
There is no order in the world around us, we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead.
There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.
The crowd, having been promised nothing, felt cheated, having received nothing.
The champagne was dead. So it goes.
The atomic bomb which we dropped on the people of Hiroshima was first envisioned by a woman, not a man. She was, of course, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. She didn't call it an atomic bomb. She called i...
That is my principal objection to life, I think: It's too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes.
Only in books do we learn what’s really going on.
Of course it is exhausting, having to reason all the time in a universe which wasn't meant to be reasonable.
I wish you'd help me look into a more interesting problem - namely, my sanity.
I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.
And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a...
If people think nature is their friend, then they sure don't need an enemy.
While the British colonel set Lazzaro’s broken arm and mixed plaster for the cast, the German major translated out loud passages from Howard W. Campbell, Jr.’s monograph. Campbell had been a fairly we...
We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.
To the as-yet-unborn, to all innocent wisps of undifferentiated nothingness: Watch out for life.
The Great Depression was going on, so that the station and the streets teemed with homeless people, just as they do today. The newspapers were full of stories of worker layoffs and farm foreclosures a...