A palindrome is a word or pattern that instead of developing in different directions it folds in on itself so that the beginning and end mirror each other, that they are the same.

With Storytelling, at least, it’s explicit: this is what the censors say American citizens, no matter what age, are not permitted to see, even though it can be seen by other people all over the...

There is in every woman’s heart a spark of heavenly fire which lies dormant in the broad daylight of prosperity, but which kindles up and beams and blazes in the dark hour of adversity.

Shyness has a strange element of narcissism, a belief that how we look, how we perform, is truly important to other people.

Hitler’s economic revolution in Germany had reduced financial considerations to a point where they played no role in economic or political decisions.

Natural selection, as it has operated in human history, favors not only the clever but the murderous.

By the end of high school I was not an educated man, but I knew how to try to become one.

I’d really like to write a book about Timothy McVeigh, but it would only work if he cooperated.

How many a man has thrown up his hands at a time when a little more effort, a little more patience, would have achieved success?

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).

The church saves sinners, but science seeks to stop their manufacture.

If the area were on or near the U.S. continental shelf, such data could well provide an enemy with strategically invaluable insights into undersea access routes that could be used to attack some of the...

Though the general principles of statecraft have survived the rise and fall of empires, every increase in knowledge has brought about changes in the political, economic, and social structure.

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...

Man is a great blunderer going about in the woods, and there is no other except the bear makes so much noise.

You can try to reach an audience, but you just write what comes out of you and you just hope that it is accepted. You do not write specifically to a generation.

I don’t try to describe the future. I try to prevent it.

I’ll just say, you hope you have an imagination at work you hope it has the support of your life experience and what you’ve observed and so forth.

The tongue is the only tool that gets sharper with use.

Rather than being an interpreter, the scientist who embraces a new paradigm is like the man wearing inverting lenses.

I feel like it has gone very fast for me, but I feel like it wasn’t instantaneous, at all. I was getting a lot of rejections. I just got very lucky and it happened quickly...

If you could have a book called My Favorite Six Stories, I don’t think I’d have trouble doing that.

The bankers made loans to business so that the volume of money increased faster than the increase in goods. The result was inflation.

There is the fear, common to all English-only speakers, that the chief purpose of foreign languages is to make fun of us. Otherwise, you know, why not just come out and say it?

I guess my idea of a good audience is one that’s quiet and listens, but also that’s alive: they respond, they’re getting the jokes, they’re with me. And that’ s been happening.

They’re after one world religion and one world government. That’s why they’ve attacked the Catholic Church so strongly, to ultimately take control over it by their doctrine.

A pessimist? That’s a person who has been intimately acquainted with an optimist.

I’m pretty catholic about what constitutes science fiction.

Optimism is a kind of heart stimulant – the digitalis of failure.

As I have tried to show, science, in producing the airplane and the wireless, has created a new international political environment to which governments must adjust their foreign policies.

Robots have a rich and storied history in movies.

My strength and my weakness are twins in the same womb.

Often we have no time for our friends but all the time in the world for our enemies.

I was in love with the whole world and all that lived in its rainy arms.

Stuff your eyes with wonder, live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.

Storytelling is the only studio movie where the censorship is perfectly clear, the only studio movie with a big red box covering up a shot. I take pride in that – and, of course, in...

Some minds seem almost to create themselves, springing up under every disadvantage and working their solitary but irresistible way through a thousand obstacles.

I could name a few songs and say exactly what summer they came out and what boy I thought I was in love with when I was fourteen years old, but I think that music...

Well, I’ve found myself a lot of times with student manuscripts, saying to them that it worries me that their work seems hermetically sealed.

When we told them we had them enrolled, they were happy. It’s given them something to focus on and an opportunity to be with their peers.

The tragedy of bold, forthright, industrious people is that they act so continuously without much thinking, that it becomes dry and empty.

Insanity is knowing that what you’re doing is completely idiotic, but still, somehow, you just can’t stop it.

Definition of a Statistician: A man who believes figures don’t lie, but admits than under analysis some of them won’t stand up either.

The reason men oppose progress is not that they hate progress, but that they love inertia.

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

The house is a factory.

Nearly every country in the world is now becoming industrialized as rapidly as it can.

Words mean nothing. Action is the only thing. Doing. That’s the only thing.

As for courage and will – we cannot measure how much of each lies within us, we can only trust there will be sufficient to carry through trials which may lie ahead.

It is extremely important to know what you don’t want to find.