Speculative fiction encompasses that which we could actually do. Sci-fi is that which we’re probably not going to see.

There would be no Sherlock Holmes if it were not for serial publication.

All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination, Imagination is the workshop of your mind, capable of turning mind energy into accomplishment and wealth.

As a novelist, you could say that I am dreaming while I am awake, and every day I can continue with yesterday’s dream. Because it is a dream, there are so many contradictions and I have to adjust them to make the story work. But, in principle, the original dream does not change.

A home without books is a body without soul.

A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true, for if the things be false, the apprehension of them is not understanding.

Poetry and lyrics are very similar. Making words bounce off a page.

Bad people are, from the point of view of art, fascinating studies. They represent colour, variety and strangeness. Good people exasperate one’s reason; bad people stir one’s imagination.

You see, I am trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across – not to just depict life – or criticize it – but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me, you actually experience the thing. You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful.

Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can. Of course, I could be wrong.

Age appears to be best in four things; old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

Men often take their imagination for their heart; and they believe they are converted as soon as they think of being converted.

I’m not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.

I’ve just always been a reader.

I wasn’t trying to be an outlaw writer. I never heard of that term; somebody else made it up. But we were all outside the law: Kerouac, Miller, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kesey; I didn’t have a gauge as to who was the worst outlaw. I just recognized allies: my people.

Wherever you write is supposed to be a little bit of a refuge, a place where you can get away from the world. The more closed in you are, the more you’re forced back on your own imagination.

Myth and fairy-story must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth (or error), but not explicit, not in the known form of the primary ‚real‘ world.

Books are divided into two classes, the books of the hour and the books of all time.

Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

We hunger to understand, so we invent myths about how we imagine the world is constructed – and they’re, of course, based upon what we know, which is ourselves and other animals. So we make up stories about how the world was hatched from a cosmic egg or created after the mating of cosmic deities or by some fiat of a powerful being.

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them I have the heart of a small boy… and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

Generally speaking, a howling wilderness does not howl: it is the imagination of the traveler that does the howling.

I’ve been really fortunate to be able to do different kinds of films in different scales, different genres, different kinds of roles, and that is important to me.

I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.

There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry.

I was always very curious as a young man about why older writers who I met seemed so indifferent to what was going on, whereas I, in my 20s, was reading everything. Everything seemed important. But they were only interested in the writers they admired when they were young, and I didn’t understand it then, but now, now I understand it.

The most watched programme on the BBC, after the news, is probably ‚Doctor Who.‘ What has happened is that science fiction has been subsumed into modern literature. There are grandparents out there who speak Klingon, who are quite capable of holding down a job. No one would think twice now about a parallel universe.

When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes and that is my idea.

I know that some books and some writers, you can pretty much draw a square around it and say, ‚Nobody under 40,‘ or ‚Nobody under 25.‘ With my books, it always has been, and continues to be, spread right across the board, and I think the operative term is ‚reader.‘

I look at athletes in all sports and try to picture what kind of football player they’d be, what position they’d play and so on.

Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.

I suspect that even most conservatives would prefer to live in the kind of world conjured up in the liberals‘ imagination rather than in the kind of world we are in fact stuck with.

Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today – but the core of science fiction, its essence has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

It is usually the imagination that is wounded first, rather than the heart; it being much more sensitive.

The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.

Early on, I was so impressed with Charles Dickens. I grew up in the South, in a little village in Arkansas, and the whites in my town were really mean, and rude. Dickens, I could tell, wouldn’t be a man who would curse me out and talk to me rudely.

Doubt thou the stars are fire, Doubt that the sun doth move. Doubt truth to be a liar, But never doubt I love.

I was warped early by Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe. I was very fond of Franz Kafka.

It is not Kafka’s fault that his wonderful writings have lately turned into a fad, and are read by people who have neither the ability nor the desire to absorb literature.

Everything I’ve been thinking, every vision, even down to every shot I throw, it just ends up here in reality. Whether it was in a fight and how to react or whether it was in a stadium with screaming fans or whether I was in a fancy car or the best clothes ever, I always put myself somewhere.

To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.

O Day of days when we can read! The reader and the book, either without the other is naught.

I like the language in Proust but not the context.

The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.

After you finish a book, you know, you’re dead. But no one knows you’re dead. All they see is the irresponsibility that comes in after the terrible responsibility of writing.

Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.

The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.

A man ought to read just as inclination leads him, for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

One thing about ‚Star Wars‘ that I’m really proud of is that it expands the imagination. That’s why I like the ‚Star Wars‘ toys.

I never liked Hans Christian Andersen because I knew he was always getting at me.

I cannot live without books.

Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.

The rudiment of verse may, possibly, be found in the spondee.

I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence.

I read a lot of obscure books and it is nice to open a book.

In Germany I have been acknowledged again since the fall of Hitler, but my works, partly suppressed by the Nazis and partly destroyed by the war; have not yet been republished there.

Cowardice… is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend functioning of the imagination.

The truest form of any form of revolutionary Left, whatever you want to call it, was Jack Kerouac, E.E. Cummings, & Ginsberg’s period. Excuse me, but that’s where it was at.