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

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" 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? "

" Evolution can go to hell as far as I am concerned. What a mistake we are. We have mortally wounded this sweet life-supporting planet - the only one in the whole Milky Way - with a century of transportation whoopee. "

" When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed. "

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

" People aren't supposed to look back. I'm certainly not going to do it anymore. "

" About astrology and palmistry: they are good because they make people vivid and full of possibilities. They are communism at its best. Everybody has a birthday and almost everybody has a palm. "

" I get up at 7:30 and work four hours a day. Nine to twelve in the morning, five to six in the evening. Businessmen would achieve better results if they studied human metabolism. No one works well eight hours a day. No one ought to work more than four hours. "

" Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. "

" If people think nature is their friend, then they sure don't need an enemy. "

" 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. "

" Still and all, why bother? Here's my answer. Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone. "

" I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the center. "

" I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different. "

" I consider anybody a twerp who hasn't read 'Democracy in America' by Alexis de Tocqueville. There can never be a better book than that one on the strengths and vulnerabilities inherent in our form of government. "

" 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. "

First Amendment

" During most of my freelancing, I made what I would have made in charge of the cafeteria at a pretty good junior-high school. "

" Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why. "

" 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. "

" The year was 2081, and everyone was finally equal. "

" 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. "

" I am honorary President of the American Humanist Society, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that utterly functionless capacity. We Humanists behave as well as we can, without any rewards or punishments in an Afterlife. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest. "

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

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

" Human beings will be happier - not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That's my utopia. "

" 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. "

" This is Sunday, and the question arises, what'll I start tomorrow? "