It came about as follows: over the years when I was involved in dianetics, I wrote the beginnings of many stories. I would get an idea, and then write the beginning, and then never touch...

I tend not to know what the plot is or the story is or even the theme. Those things come later, for me.

My theory was that what I had to do was make a study of human behavior.

That’s Anil’s path. She grows up in Sri Lanka, goes and gets educated abroad, and through fate or chance gets brought back by the Human Rights Commission to investigate war crimes.

It’s difficult for me to feel that a solid page without the breakups of paragraphs can be interesting. I break mine up perhaps sooner than I should in terms of the usage of the English...

I’m a Canadian citizen. But I always want to feel at home in Sri Lanka. I’m a member of both countries.

The encouragement I got from Campbell was a quick check and praise. Once the Space Beagle was launched on its mission, it seemed natural for it to breed additional thoughts.

The past is still, for us, a place that is not safely settled.

In those days I was new to covers; merely felt pleased that a story of mine had been honored. I later met Rogers who did some of my early covers and I was impressed with...

In the book the relationship with Katharine and Almasy is sort of only in the patient’s mind.

Well, first of all, going off with dianetics was based upon a thought of mine.

To write about someone like myself would be very limiting.

You have to remember that I was a bright but simple fellow from Canada who seldom, if ever, met another writer, and then only a so-called literary type that occasionally sold a story and meanwhile...

It doubles your perception, to write from the point of view of someone you’re not.

As a craftsman, I made my living at writing from the moment I crossed the line at age 20, and sold my first story to True Story Magazine.

Truth, at the wrong time, can be dangerous.

Recruiting Station was a story that came as the result of many anxious awakenings during many nights.

It’s a discovery of a story when I write a book, a case of inching ahead on each page and discovering what’s beyond in the darkness, beyond where you’re writing.

But, somewhere in there, I did have the thought that this really fits in with my thinking about what I wanted to do; with what has to be done by a writer in order to...

When you’re writing, it’s as if you’re within a kind of closed world.

The last three books are much more a case of a moment of history, what happened almost by accident or coincidence, like being in the same elevator or lifeboat.

It’s a responsibility of the writer to get the reader out of the story somehow.

I did not go along with the new theories that Hubbard was offering. They had a religious aspect and I paid no attention to them.

You don’t want to write your own opinion, you don’t want to just represent yourself, but represent yourself through someone else.

I don’t see novels ending with any real sense of closure.

It’s an odd state to be in, blowing the whistle on your home country.

I figure that that has a ten year cycle. At the end of that ten years, I began to get worried that I would run into what is known as the writer’s block, the feeling...

You want to suggest something new, but at the same time, resolve the drama of the action in the novel.

A writer uses a pen instead of a scalpel or blow torch.

Chum was a British boy’s weekly which, at the end of the year was bound into a single huge book; and the following Christmas parents bought it as Christmas presents for male children.

It’s why you create characters: so you can argue with yourself.

I first read science fiction in the old British Chum annual when I was about 12 years old.

You’re getting everyone’s point of view at the same time, which, for me, is the perfect state for a novel: a cubist state, the cubist novel.

As a writer, one is busy with archaeology.

I don’t recall having any self-awareness about the intricacy of my stories.

Once I’ve discovered the story, I might restructure it, maybe move things around, set up a clue that something is going to happen later, but that happens much later in an editorial capacity.

I had casually rented an apartment that cost $75 a month because I expected my writing to pay my way.

I don’t have a plan for a story when I sit down to write. I would get quite bored carrying it out.

I wrote what interested me; and my method of working out my story through the dream process probably underlay the wheels within wheels aspect.

Research can be a big clunker. It’s difficult to know how you can make the historical light.

In a sense, there’s a great truth to that, but, also I was a great reader.

I see the poem or the novel ending with an open door.

My mother takes full credit for my being a writer. Apparently, when she was carrying me, she said, she read an endless number of detective stories.

Right now, I have no idea what I will write or if I will write again.