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" 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. "

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" Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae. "

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

" 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 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. "

" New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become. "

" I was not an anthropology student prior to the war. I took it up as part of a personal readjustment following some bewildering experiences as an infantryman and later as a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany. The science of the Study of Man has been extremely satisfactory from that personal standpoint. "

" Anything can make me stop and look and wonder, and sometimes learn. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own. "

" What troubles me most about my lovely country is that its children are seldom taught that American freedom will vanish, if, when they grow up, and in the exercise of their duties as citizens, they insist that our courts and policemen and prisons be guided by divine or natural law. "

" 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. "

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

" Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself. But mankind wasn't always so lucky. Less than a century ago, men and women did not have easy access to the puzzle boxes within them. "

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

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

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

" Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured. "