My old English buddy, John Rackham, wrote and told me what made science fiction different from all other kinds of literature – science fiction is written according to the science fiction method.

Cosmology, nuclear physics, I do try to keep up on. They get more complex, and then some of the old theories just don’t work out.

People ask me how I do research for my science fiction. The answer is, I never do any research.

I did that for 40 years or more. I never had any writer’s block. I got up in the morning, sat down at the typewriter – now, computer – lit up a cigarette.

Stories where the author has known very little, but run a computer program that tells him how to construct a planet, and looked up specific things about rocketry and so on, really suck.

I don’t think the scientific method and the science fictional method are really analogous. The thing about them is that neither is really practiced very much, at least not consciously. But the fact that they...

That’s the method: restructure the world we live in in some way, then see what happens.

A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.

I was thinking of writing a little foreword saying that history is, after all, based on people’s recollections, which change with time.

The big new development in my life is, when I turned 80, I decided I no longer have to do four pages a day. For me, it’s like retiring.

I was worried about sex,” he went on. “But you know what, Sulie? It’s like being told I can’t have any caviar for the next couple years. I don’t even like caviar. And when you...

I’m doing a book, ‘Chasing Science,’ about the pleasures of science as a spectator sport.

The head of Fermilab was reading Astonishing Stories when he was ten.

They were two lovely choices. One of them meant giving up every chance of a decent life forever…and the other one scared me out of my mind.

I’m pretty catholic about what constitutes science fiction.

The science fiction method is dissection and reconstruction.

The robots came bearing a gift and the name of it was “Plenty.”Plenty is a habit-forming drug. You do not cut the dosage down. You kick it if you can; you stop the dose entirely....

If you don’t care about science enough to be interested in it on its own, you shouldn’t try to write hard science fiction. You can write like Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison as much as...

The way you write science fiction is: you sit down at your writing machine and you open your mind to the first thought that comes through.

Stephen Hawking said he spent most of his first couple of years at Cambridge reading science fiction (and I believe that, because his grades weren’t all that great).

In terms of stories I would buy for a science fiction magazine, if they take place in the future, that might do it.

There is a method which distinguishes SF from fantasy, though a lot of the science fiction written does not go by that method, and some fantasy does.

A large fraction of the most interesting scientists have read a lot of SF at one time or another, either early enough that it may have played a part in their becoming scientists or at...

It’s clear that science and science fiction have overlapping populations.

You look at the world around you, and you take it apart into all its components. Then you take some of those components, throw them away, and plug in different ones, start it up and...

A lot of science fiction is science-based, and it comes about because people notice something interesting about science and work it into a story.

My first thought was always a cigarette. It still is, but I haven’t cheated.

A lot of the cosmologists and astrophysicists clearly had been reading science fiction.