But whether, for example, a coat can be exchanged for twenty yards of linen cloth or for forty yards is not a matter of chance, but depends upon objective conditions, upon the amount of socially...

Insane people are always sure that they are fine. It is only the sane people who are willing to admit that they are crazy.

I was silent as a child, and silenced as a young woman; I am taking my lumps and bumps for being a big mouth, now, but usually from those whose opinion I don’t respect.

The examined life is no picnic.

A real decision is measured by the fact that you’ve taken a new action. If there’s no action, you haven’t truly decided.

Want to learn to eat a lot? Here it is: Eat a little. That way, you will be around long enough to eat a lot.

The Law of Raspberry Jam: the wider any culture is spread, the thinner it gets.

City people try to buy time as a rule, when they can, whereas country people are prepared to kill time, although both try to cherish in their mind’s eye the notion of a better life...

I’d rather spend my leisure time doing what some people call my work and I call my fun.

Mysteries I read for fun, so I will probably never write one, for fear of spoiling the fun.

I find it painful and angering to look in a mirror.

What’s the use of making mysteries? It only makes people want to nose ’em out.

Now, for pure bloggers, for individual people who are just posting their own thoughts, they would still run the same risk of saying something wrong or embarrassing, but they wouldn’t harm their institutions by doing...

We experienced similiar fears in the 1880s, at the end of World War I and II. And we ran out in the 1970s.

I didn’t start working on children’s books until I got a job at a book warehouse on the children’s floor. When I started reading some of the books, I was so impressed.

I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours.

It was fun. That was something I came to fairly late.

To refuse awards is another way of accepting them with more noise than is normal.

I think they’ve been baby bummers.

Faith is reason grown courageous.

When they tell you to grow up, they mean stop growing.

Surmounting difficulty is the crucible that forms character.

The person we believe ourselves to be will always act in a manner consistent with our self-image.

Knowledge is the most democratic source of power.

Some people have much more pull than other people. But when I say that the public has ultimate responsibility, I’m not saying it in a moral sense. I’m just saying it in the sense of...

The broadest pattern of history – namely, the differences between human societies on different continents – seems to me to be attributable to differences among continental environments, and not to biological differences among peoples themselves.

There’s a big overlap with the people you meet at the fantasy and science fiction cons.

I have never known a novel that was good enough to be good in spite of its being adapted to the author’s political views.

ESPN has said that they fired me without having been told to do so by Disney, and I actually believe that. I think they did it on their own.

I have been free for more than a month. Some people may think that that is long enough. Others may think that that is not quite long enough.

I have a kind of standard explanation why, which goes like this: Science fiction is one way of making sense out of a senseless world.

It distresses me that parents insist that their children read or make them read. The best way for children to treasure reading is to see the adults in their lives reading for their own pleasure.

About astrology and palmistry: they are good because they make people vivid and full of possibilities. They are communism at its best. Everybody has a birthday and almost everybody has a palm.

The ‘Talk of the Town’ was really that in the 1940s: it was all about New York, it was only about New York, and it was about people.

My mother wanted us to understand that the tragedies of your life one day have the potential to be comic stories the next.

Sometimes I feel I can’t quite master my written and spoken Spanish, because I’m too much a student of English. I would need another lifetime to learn it.

If you want an interesting party sometime, combine cocktails and a fresh box of crayons for everyone.

My definition of success is to live your life in a way that causes you to feel a ton of pleasure and very little pain – and because of your lifestyle, have the people around...

If what you are doing is not moving you towards your goals, then it’s moving you away from your goals.

I don’t know how a fellow looks, when he meets somebody that he hasn’t seen, hasn’t heard of, don’t know where they are, know nothing about the house, whatever.

Thousands of years ago, humans domesticated every possible large wild mammal species fulfilling all those criteria and worth domesticating, with the result that there have been no valuable additions of domestic animals in recent times,...

I finally decided one day, reading science fiction magazines of the time, I could do at least as well as some of these people are doing. So I finally made a serious effort.

No man will work for your interests unless they are his.

If we’d stop trying to be happy we could have a pretty good time.

I think they completely overreacted by firing me, but in my mind I think this coming a month after Rush Limbaugh had a lot to do with it.

I had an opportunity to meet some members of the public, which I have been doing in Rangoon, too. It was very educational for me.

To my mind, the best SF addresses itself to problems of the here and now, or even to problems which have never been solved and never will be solved – I’m thinking of Philip K....

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.

I like giving readers an opportunity to get a hold of me in that way and to read things I’ve written which might disappear otherwise.

It is obvious, moreover, that the formation of price in capitalist society must differ from the formation of price in social conditions based upon the simple production of commodities.