 As far as I'm concerned, I didn't dream - ever. |
| You don't sit up in a cave and write the Great American Novel and know it is utterly superb, and then throw it page by page into the fire. You just don't do that. You send it out. You have to send it out. |
| You write a story about loneliness, and you grab them all because everybody's an expert on that one. |
| I sent The World Well Lost to one editor who rejected it on sight, and then wrote a letter to every other editor in the field warning them against the story, and urging them to reject it on sight without reading it. |
| There is no way of writing stories that I haven't done. |
| You have to study your field and you have to find out how other people do it, and you have to keep working and learning and practicing and ultimately, you would be able to do it. |
| I have lived most of my life with the conviction that I don't dream, because I never could retrieve a dream. |
| I quit my job, and went ashore to become a writer. |
| I wrote the very first stories in science fiction which dealt with homosexuality, The World Well Lost and Affair With a Green Monkey. |
| Anybody can do anything he wants to if he wants to do it badly enough. |
| The first writing I did was short short stories for a newspaper syndicate for which I was paid five dollars a piece on publication. |
| When you combine something to say with the skill to say it properly, then you've got a good writer. |
| Inner space is so much more interesting, because outer space is so empty. |
| In science fiction, you can also test out your own realities. |
| The movers and shakers have always been obsessive nuts. |
| For years, I thought I simply didn't dream. I felt left out. Everybody else had a thing I didn't have. |
| Writing is a communication. |
| Ninety percent of everything is crap. |
| I write a story as if it were a letter to someone and essentially, that's what you do. |
| Basically, fiction is people. You can't write fiction about ideas. |
