Writer

I find to my mixed astonishment that I do dream, but I didn't know it.

There was so much that you could do, instead of looking for things that you couldn't do.

When you combine something to say with the skill to say it properly, then you've got a good writer.

I sent The World Well Lost to one editor who rejected it on sight, and then wrote a letter to every other editor in the field warning them against the story, and urging them to reject it on sight without reading it.

Some major writers have a huge impact, like Ayn Rand, who to my mind is a lousy fiction writer because her writing has no compassion and virtually no humor. She has a philosophical and economical message that she is passing off as fiction, but it really isn't fiction at all.

In science fiction, you can also test out your own realities.

As far as I'm concerned, I didn't dream - ever.

I teach writing courses and first of all, I teach my students what prosody is.

You have to study your field and you have to find out how other people do it, and you have to keep working and learning and practicing and ultimately, you would be able to do it.

I write a story as if it were a letter to someone and essentially, that's what you do.

You don't sit up in a cave and write the Great American Novel and know it is utterly superb, and then throw it page by page into the fire. You just don't do that. You send it out. You have to send it out.

I learned how to live on five and sometimes ten dollars a week.

I wrote the very first stories in science fiction which dealt with homosexuality, The World Well Lost and Affair With a Green Monkey.

Inner space is so much more interesting, because outer space is so empty.

You must write to the people's expertise.

Fiction is very important to me. It's what I do, it's what I do with my life.

Once I had all the facts in, I found I didn't have the immoral courage to pull the caper. So I wrote it as a story. As a teenager, I didn't have any skills for writing as such, so it came out in 1500 words.

I've always written very tightly, and there's a good reason for that. There's no point in using words that you're not going to apply.

The movers and shakers have always been obsessive nuts.

There are people who have tremendously important things to say, but they say it so poorly that nobody would ever want to read it.