The purpose of aphorisms is to keep fools who have memorised them from having nothing to say.

There is less trouble and trauma involved in writing a new piece than in trying to salvage an unsatisfactory old one.

The undramatic fact is that I just think and think and think until I have something [for a story], and there is nothing marvelous or artistic about the phenomenon.

Certain success evicts one from the paradise of winning against the odds.

The military mind remains unparalleled as a vehicle of creative stupidity.

It is very likely that there are many, many planets carrying life, even intelligent life, throughout the universe, because there are so many stars. By sheer chance, even if those chances are small, a great many life forms and a great many intelligences may exist.

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

I believe that every human being with a physically normal brain can learn a great deal and can be surprisingly intellectual. I believe that what we badly need is social approval of learning and social rewards for learning.We can all be members of the intellectual elite and then, and only then, will a phrase like "America's right to know" and, indeed, any true concept of democracy, have any meaning.

Creationists make it sound as though a "theory" is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night.

It is my own experience ... that commentators are far more ingenious at finding meaning than authors are at inserting it.