There is never a shortage anywhere of lawyers eager to attack the first amendment, as though it were nothing more than a clause in a lease from a crooked slumlord.
It may be that the most striking thing about members of my literary generation in retrospect will be that we were allowed to say absolutely anything without fear of punishment.
I was a chemistry major, but I'm always winding up as a teacher in english departments, so I've brought scientific thinking to literature. There's been very little gratitude for this.
Over the years, people I've met have often asked me what I'm working on, and I've usually replied that the main thing was a book about dresden.
If you are an american, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own.
There is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look.
If you appear in the 'atlantic' or 'harper's' or the 'new yorker,' by god, you must be a writer, because everybody says so.
I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.
There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the mafia.
I now make my living by being impolite. I am clumsy at it.
When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.
I don't plot my books rigidly, follow a preconceived structure. A novel mustn't be a closed system - it's a quest.
During most of my freelancing, I made what I would have made in charge of the cafeteria at a pretty good junior-high school.
I let the dog out, or I let him in, and we talk some. I let him know I like him, and he lets me know he likes me.
Never index your own book.
Back in my days as a chemistry student, I used to be quite a technocrat. I was firmly convinced that scientists would have cornered god and photographed him in color by 1951.
All writers are going to have to learn more about science, because it's such an interesting part of their environment.
New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.
A chaplain's assistant is customarily a figure of fun in the american army.
I hope to build a reputation as a science-fiction writer. That's the pitch. We'll see.
My cash cows, the slick magazines, were put out of business by TV.
I'm screamingly funny, you know, I really am in the books. And that helps because I'm funnier than a lot of people, I think, and that's appreciated by young people.
That is how you get to be a writer, incidentally: you feel somehow marginal, somehow slightly off-balance all the time.
I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours.
We could have saved the earth but we were too damned cheap.
I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolution so far, but I think it's a very poor scheme for survival.
This country is being managed to death, being public related to death.
I left the middle west for schenectady because the general electric company offered me a more congenial, better paying job than did anyone else.
I am from a family of artists. Here I am, making a living in the arts. It has not been a rebellion. It's as though I had taken over the family ESSO station.
People don't come to church for preachments, of course, but to daydream about god.