 There are people who have tremendously important things to say, but they say it so poorly that nobody would ever want to read it. |
| There was so much that you could do, instead of looking for things that you couldn't do. |
| You must write to the people's expertise. |
| It should consist of short, sharply focused sentences, each of which is a whole scene in itself. |
| I feel angry that I can't be hypnotized. I'm not putting it down, and I'm not saying that it doesn't exist. I have talked to a great many people who are very good at it, but so far nobody has ever been able to hypnotize me. |
| As far as hypnosis is concerned, I had a very serious problem when I was in my twenties. I encountered a man who later became the president of the American Society of Medical Hypnosis. He couldn't hypnotize me. |
| Once I had all the facts in, I found I didn't have the immoral courage to pull the caper. So I wrote it as a story. As a teenager, I didn't have any skills for writing as such, so it came out in 1500 words. |
| There are a lot of people who write very intensely about things they do not and cannot do. |
| Some major writers have a huge impact, like Ayn Rand, who to my mind is a lousy fiction writer because her writing has no compassion and virtually no humor. She has a philosophical and economical message that she is passing off as fiction, but it really isn't fiction at all. |
| Fiction is very important to me. It's what I do, it's what I do with my life. |
| Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever. |
| When I can't do something, this always impels me to study it. |
| I've always written very tightly, and there's a good reason for that. There's no point in using words that you're not going to apply. |
| My wife is beginning to instruct me on means to retrieve dreams, and bit by bit, it does seem to be working. |
| The story of my very first sale is the fact that I dreamed up a foolproof paper to cheat an insurance company out of several hundred thousand dollars. |
| I learned how to live on five and sometimes ten dollars a week. |
| I teach writing courses and first of all, I teach my students what prosody is. |
| Here's the point to be made - there are no synonyms. There are no two words that mean exactly the same thing. |
| I find to my mixed astonishment that I do dream, but I didn't know it. |
| Create a world in which these things do or do not exist, or in which they are extended in some way. Test reality against this fiction. The reader will recognize the world that you're talking about, even though it may be another one altogether. |
