You must learn to control your dreams or your dreams will forever control you.

Resistance, however, is useless. (1939)

Your demons are always with you,” Skale answered. His voice seemed even raspier than the day before. “Don’t you understand that by now? Always with you, impossible to escape. But you never can guess how they might manifest themselves.

[Science fiction is] out in the mainstream now. You can tell by the way mainstream literary authors pillage SF while denying they’re writing it!

I get tired of hearing some science-fiction fans saying that characterization isn’t important in SF. In point of fact, I think it’s probably more important in SF than in mainstream fiction. After all, if the author can’t characterize humans well, he or she probably can’t characterize aliens well either.

Madge: I don’t know why I keep shouting at them.The Doctor: Because every time you see them happy you remember how sad they’re going to be. And it breaks your heart. Because what’s the point in them being happy now if they’re going to be sad later. The answer is, of course, because they are...

Well we’ve moved through the funfair a bit – we’ve done the rollercoaster, now we’re on the ghost train.

… You have to pull the feet to break the neck. They let the loved ones do it.

I never read to kill time. Killing time is like killing someone’s wife or a child. There is nothing more precious for me than time.

Secrets, however long they are kept, usually still manage to be brought to light. The best you can hope for is that you’ll be in control of when a secret gets out, not if it does.” -Melody in CHIMERA-

One can lose themselves in the twilight, when there are no colors to guide the way.

Doubt is what keeps the heart and mind of every man alive. It ‘s what makes us think twice.

The obsession with correct political belief and expression in art is stultifying the genre as it is necessarily exclusive. We are losing our voice in artificial, forced homogeny posing as tolerance. Propaganda-disguised-as-story drives readers away as agenda takes the place of wonder, excitement, character. and conflict.

I maintain that cultural sensitivity should be replaced by cultural awareness. Awareness implies research, consideration, thought, and judiciousness….Sensitivity denies equal access to language. It segregates and censors based on the background of the writer rather than the content of the story. No society can embrace cultural sensitivity and retain full capacity for freedom of speech.

Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole.

Your thoughts are transparent.

…They are merely scars, not mortal wounds and you must use them to propel you forward.

To the brave crew and passengers of the Kobayshi Maru…sucks to be you.

May the scribes record it.

There’s a sameness to streetlife. On every world I’ve ever been, the same underlying patterns play out, flaunt and vaunt, buy and sell, like some distilled essence of human behavior seeping out from whatever clanking political machine has been dropped on it from above.

A novel is a bridge from one heart to another. – Anon

The king was pregnant.

Science Fiction properly conceived, like all serious fiction, however funny, is a way of trying to describe what is going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast sack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this...

Was he leaving home, or going home?

I go on writing in both respectable and despised genres because I respect them all, rejoice in their differences, and reject only the prejudice and ignorance that dismisses any book, unread, as not worth reading.” — “On Despising Genres,” essay

None were left now to unname, and yet how close I felt to them when I saw one of them swim or fly or trot or crawl across my way or over my skin, or stalk me in the night, or go along beside me for a while in the day. They seemed far closer...

Tomorrow morning, he decided, I’ll begin clearing away the sand of fifty thousand centuries for my first vegetable garden. That’s the initial step.

When I was a child, I thought as a child. But now I have put away childish things.

A merry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the mood organ beside his bed awakened Rick Deckard.

You mean old books?””Stories written before space travel but about space travel.””How could there have been stories about space travel before –“”The writers,” Pris said, “made it up.

Almost everything carried to its logical extreme becomes either depressing or carcinogenic.

Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups… So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not...

I suppose it’s impossible to say that they will not invent anything else, because they might,” said Zubria. “And, of course, if one thought of something that they might invent, one would have thought of it oneself, therefore one would be the inventor of what one thought of, and they would not be, which would...

Space, as you can see, is a complete void, nothing but clear air, without solid objects or the illumination of light. On some of our photographs of space, however, studied close to, even without a magnifying glass or an enlargement lens, you will notice, in the remote background, stars, some solitary, others in shimmering clusters....

Brother Cavil: In all your travels, have you ever seen a star go supernova? …I have. I saw a star explode and send out the building blocks of the Universe. Other stars, other planets and eventually other life. A supernova! Creation itself! I was there. I wanted to see it and be part of the...

Archie wasn’t waiting for her at the attic. She didn’t consider that. He wasprobably giving her time to set and collect a trap, about a week or so as she guessed, a testing period. He couldn’t trust her just yet, but she could tell that there was also more to it. He needed to distance...

I guess I’m just an old mad scientist at bottom. Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom-smashers, and a beautiful girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation’s laws.

The day the nation voted on whether I’d live or die, I woke up with a headache.

People who couldn’t imagine themselves capable of evil were at a major disadvantage in dealing with people who didn’t need to imagine, because they already were. She’d said it was always a mistake, to believe those people were different, special, infected with something that was inhuman, subhuman, fundamentally other. Which reminded her of what her...

A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly. All the speed he took, all the turns he’d taken and the corners he cut in Night City, and he’d still see the matrix in his dreams, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colourless void… The Sprawl was a long, strange way...

His eyes were eggs of unstable crystal, vibrating with a frequency whose name was rain and the sound of trains, suddenly sprouting a humming forest of hair-fine glass spines.

I guess I should thank you for totally making my morning. It’s not every day a stranger notices my perspiration level.- Dr. Jeri Asher (BLACK MARIAH – A Calling)

My father and I used to watch a ton of old horror movies when I was growing up. ’The Creature from the Black Lagoon‘ was one of my father’s favorites and he was very excited for me to see the film. But after the movie was over, I told him that I was kind of...

A science fiction story is a story built around human beings, with a human problem and a human solution, which would not have happened at all without its scientific content.

Despite centuries of English literature, the most famous split infinitive in all of history comes from Star Trek.

He was pale as only one state on Bhast dictated—not lacking color necessarily or vitality, certainly. Fey white was more comparable to a pearl; the color subtle and the luster soft, but still vibrant. In spite of the tragedy that could come with it, it was not a dying state. It was a state of...

I’ve always loved science fiction. I think the smartest writers are science fiction writers dealing with major things.” – Associated Press interview, 12-7-11

That was asking a lot of my readers, I realized, but I was trying to write the novel I would most enjoy decoding.

The emotional tone or affect of the tale should be hot and engaged, not remote and dispassionate.

Science fiction [is] the kind of writing that prepares us for the necessary mutations brought about in society from an ever changing technological world and as a result. The mainstream hasn’t excluded SF; the mainstream has excluded itself. No one told Jules Verne he was a science fiction writer, but he invented the 20th century.