Science sent the Hubble telescope out into space, so it could capture light and the absence thereof, from the very beginning of time. And the telescope really did that. So now we know that there was once absolutely nothing, such a perfect nothing that there wasn't even nothing or once.

I think big business is a terrible thing for the spirit of the country, as our spirit is the best thing about us.

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.

Puny man can do nothing at all to help or please God Almighty, and Luck is not the hand of God.

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.

When I'm being funny, I try not to offend. I don't think much of what I've done has been in really ghastly taste. I don't think I have embarrassed many people or distressed them.

Oh, sure, we have another world war coming, and another great depression, but where are the leaders this time?

This country is being managed to death, being public related to death.

That is how you get to be a writer, incidentally: you feel somehow marginal, somehow slightly off-balance all the time.

I don't plot my books rigidly, follow a preconceived structure. A novel mustn't be a closed system - it's a quest.

All writers are going to have to learn more about science, because it's such an interesting part of their environment.

One might be led to suspect that there were all sorts of things going on in the universe which he or she did not thoroughly understand.

If you appear in the 'Atlantic' or 'Harper's' or the 'New Yorker,' by God, you must be a writer, because everybody says so.

Any man can call time out, but no man can say how long the time out will be.

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

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.

I left the Middle West for Schenectady because the General Electric Company offered me a more congenial, better paying job than did anyone else.

A chaplain's assistant is customarily a figure of fun in the American Army.

To whom it may concern: It is springtime. It is late afternoon.

It is a big temptation to me, when I create a character for a novel, to say that he is what he is because of faulty wiring, or because of microscopic amounts of chemicals which he ate or failed to eat on that particular day.

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 have no degree in biochemistry, neither do I have one in mechanical engineering, as the Army saw fit to terminate both courses before they were finished.

I think a lot of people, including me, clammed up when a civilian asked about battle, about war. It was fashionable. One of the most impressive ways to tell your war story is to refuse to tell it, you know. Civilians would then have to imagine all kinds of deeds of derring-do.

Actually, to be an effective person politically in this country, I think you have to be thirty or over, and also you have to be rich, well-placed, you have to be close to power. And I don't think that young people, because they look young, can do much, as I think they are counterproductive.

I think I belong to America's last generation of novelists. Novelists will come one by one from now on, not in seeming families, and will perhaps write only one or two novels, and let it go at that.

Never index your own book.

All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is.

The feeling about a soldier is, when all is said and done, he wasn't really going to do very much with his life anyway. The example usually is: he wasn't going to compose Beethoven's Fifth.

Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.

I now make my living by being impolite. I am clumsy at it.

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.

My cash cows, the slick magazines, were put out of business by TV.

It was very lucky for me as a writer that I studied the physical sciences rather than English. I wrote for my own amusement. There was no kindly English professor to tell me for my own good how awful my writing really was. And there was no professor with the power to order me what to read, either.

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 hope to build a reputation as a science-fiction writer. That's the pitch. We'll see.

Younger scientists are extremely sensitive to the moral implications of all they do.