Because the chief commodity a writer has to sell is his courage. And if he has none, he is more than a coward. He is a sellout and a fink and a heretic, because writing is a holy chore.

A man may truly live in his dreams, his noblest dreams, but only, only if he is worthy of those dreams.

These were the real substances of his nature, the true faces of his sins, the marks in the ledger of a life he had never had, yet had worshipped silently at an altar of evil.

I hate being wrong, but I love it when I'm set straight.

Science fiction and fantasy is a kind of literature that embodies the highest aspirations of the human race.

We've got technological wonders around us, and we've used them to abrogate all responsibility for everything in our lives.

For the first time we have a weapon that nobody has used for thirty years. This gives me great hope for the human race.

I can't picture in my mind three hundred and sixty thousand dollars... When I think of it, all I can see in my mind is a big nickel.

When you're a writer, you have to have the passion and the skill and the craft. It's not just enough to have the passion. You've gotta have all three.

I usually say I write for the smartest, cleverest, wittiest audience I know, and that's me.

If one is unable to buy Courvoisier, one should forcibly restrain oneself from serving strawberries Romanoff for dessert.

I refuse to write the same story twice. I keep experimenting. I keep learning how to work. I've been at it pretty much 50 years, and I'm now beginning to learn how to do the job well.

They minute people fall in love they become liars.

I see all. I hear all. I know all. And I spend a great deal of time in the bathroom.

People on the outside think there's something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn't like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that's all there is to it.

They change scapegoats at the networks more regularly than some people change socks.

I go to bed angry every night, and I get up angrier every morning.

I never know what I'm going to talk about until I get on stage. I never give the same lecture twice, which is why I'll have people follow me from place to place like Deadheads.

People don't die from the old diseases any more. They die from new ones, but that's Progress, isn't it? Isn't it?

There might be children in Somalia or the Arctic who have never heard of 'Hamlet' or the 'Great Gatsby.' But you can bet they know 'Tarzan.'