Hope is a psychological mechanism unaffected by external realities.

The brown book I carry says there is nothing stranger than to explore a city wholly different from all those one knows, since to do so is to explore a second and unsuspected self. I...

Reality is a crutch for people who can’t handle science fiction.

I’ve boxed, though not professionally.

Whatever we may say, all of us suffer from disturbed sleep at times.Some in truth hardly sleep, though some who sleep copiously swear that they do not.Some are disquieted by incessant dreams, and a fortunate...

I would like [my readers] to better understand human beings and human life as a result of having read [my] stories. I’d like them to feel that this was an experience that made things better...

Tous, nous aimons ce que nous détruisons.

My definition of good literature is that which can be read by an educated reader, and reread with increased pleasure.

Knowledge is soon changed, then lost in the mist, an echo half-heard.

I have no way of knowing whether you, who eventually will read this record, like stories or not. If you do not, no doubt you have turned these pages without attention. I confess that I...

There is one final point, the point that separates a true multivolume work from a short story, a novel, or a series. The ending of the final volume should leave the reader with the feeling...

It is well, I think, for us to learn to tell evil from good; but it has its price, as everything does. We leave our evil friend behind.

The castle? The monster? The man of learning? I only just thought of it. Surely you know that just as the momentous events of the past cast their shadows down the ages, so now, when...

My whole life experience feeds into my writing. I think that must be true for every writer. Clearly the Army and combat were major influences; just the same, you need to understand that many of...

That we are capable only of being what we are remains our unforgivable sin.

There is no magic. There is only knowledge, more or less hidden.

Just as the room of the Inquisitor in Dr. Talos’s play, with its high judicial bench, lurked somewhere at the lowest level of the House Absolute, so we have each of us in the dustiest...

Master Palaemon’s hand, dry and wrinkled as a mummy’s, groped until it found mine. “Among the initiates of religion it is said, ‘You are an epopt always.’ The reference is not only to knowledge but...

Online publication is fine with me, in part because I hope to collect those stories later.

If Thecla had symbolized love of which I felt myself undeserving, as I know now that she did, then did her symbolic force disappear when I locked the door of her cell behind me? That...

You believe me wise because I taught you once, but I have not been north, as you have. You have seen (what) I have never seen…You flatter me by asking my opinion.

What a man knows hardly matters. It is what he does.

We can think only of creatures, of things He’s made. Creatures are all we know, and can be all we know until we know Him. When we think of Him like that, we find we...

Whether the medium is ready for consumers is better judged by those consumers. I sometimes read online – but not often. The stigma is attached to pay scales. Much online publication is no pay or...

When a gift is deserved, it is not a gift but a payment.

The would-be sorcerer alone has faith in the efficacy of pure knowledge; rational people know that things act of themselves or not at all.

If you have a machine with three or four parts, you can shake them up in a box and it’s still pretty clear what’s there. If you have a machine with 10,000 parts and you...

And as if by magic – and it may have been magic, for I believe America is the land of magic, and that we, we now past Americans, were once the magical people of it,...

You seem to think that the only genuine existence evil can have is conscious existence – that no one is evil unless he admits it to himself. I disagree.

My rule is never save bits. They get the way, and you don’t think of anything new. Put ’em in. Make a big mess.

It was earliest morning, when even small trees cast long shadows and scarlet foxes trot denward through the dew like flecks of fire.

Ambiguity is necessary in some of my stories, not in all. In those, it certainly contributes to the richness of the story. I doubt that thematic closure is never attainable.

Once or twice I saw evidence that rats had been nesting among the books, rearranging them to make snug two and three-level homes for themselves and smearing dung on the covers to form the rude...

A youthful American voice isn’t particularly challenging – I’ve been a young American, and they’re all around me. I can walk from my house to Barrington High School.

I have sometimes thought that the reason the trees are so quiet in the summer is that they are in a sort of ecstasy; it is in winter, when the biologists tell us they sleep,...

People don’t want other people to be people.

He’s not rewarding us by talking to us. He’s talking to us because He has something to say to us directly, as opposed to the things He says to all humanity.

We are like children who look at print and see a serpent in the last letter but one, and a sword in the last.

Then I could not help wondering what the watching gods thought of us, with our clever masks and our jokes. What we think of crickets, perhaps, whose singing we hear with pleasure, though some of...

It seems to me that you can almost define civilization by saying it’s people who are not willing to hurt other people because the other people are different.

I don’t think anyone is more intrinsically holy. People experience God in many ways; and it seems to me that God does what the rest of us do: He chooses the means that best gets...

… I believe in some sense much akin to the belief of faith, that I noticed, felt, or underwent what I describe—but it may be that the only reason childhood memories act on us so...

Time turns our lies into truths.

I had turned my mind from my survival just as a man suffering from a deadly sickness manages by a thousand tricks never to look at death squarely; or rather, as a woman alone in...

Weak people believe what is forced on them. Strong people what they wish to believe, forcing that to be real.

I have read only the first ‘Harry Potter’ book. I thought it excellent, perhaps the best thing written for older children since The Hobbit. I wish the books had been around when my kids were...

But I was awake, sitting by the window looking down at the trailer and Mr. Zoltan’s truck. I could not sleep. That is how it is with folks my age. We take naps during the...

And what of the dead? I own that I thought of myself, at times, almost as dead. Are they not locked below ground in chambers smaller than mine was, in their millions of millions? There...

Time itself is a thing, so it seems to me, that stands solidly like a fence of iron palings with its endless row of years; and we flow past like Gyoll, on our way to...

We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges.