The first writing I did was short short stories for a newspaper syndicate for which I was paid five dollars a piece on publication.

You write a story about loneliness, and you grab them all because everybody’s an expert on that one.

The movers and shakers have always been obsessive nuts.

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.

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.

There is no way of writing stories that I haven’t done.

Anybody can do anything he wants to if he wants to do it badly enough.

Inner space is so much more interesting, because outer space is so empty.

There are people who have tremendously important things to say, but they say it so poorly that nobody would ever want to read it.

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.

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.

There are a lot of people who write very intensely about things they do not and cannot do.

I write a story as if it were a letter to someone and essentially, that’s what you do.

As far as I’m concerned, I didn’t dream – ever.

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’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.

Fiction is very important to me. It’s what I do, it’s what I do with my life.

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.

I learned how to live on five and sometimes ten dollars a week.

Ninety percent of everything is crap.

There was so much that you could do, instead of looking for things that you couldn’t do.

My wife is beginning to instruct me on means to retrieve dreams, and bit by bit, it does seem to be working.

Here’s the point to be made – there are no synonyms. There are no two words that mean exactly the same thing.

In science fiction, you can also test out your own realities.

The first writing I did was short short stories for a newspaper syndicate for which I was paid five dollars a piece on publication.

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.

When I can’t do something, this always impels me to study it.

When you combine something to say with the skill to say it properly, then you’ve got a good writer.

I find to my mixed astonishment that I do dream, but I didn’t know it.

Basically, fiction is people. You can’t write fiction about ideas.

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.

I teach writing courses and first of all, I teach my students what prosody is.

It should consist of short, sharply focused sentences, each of which is a whole scene in itself.

I have lived most of my life with the conviction that I don’t dream, because I never could retrieve a dream.

Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever.

For years, I thought I simply didn’t dream. I felt left out. Everybody else had a thing I didn’t have.

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.

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.

You must write to the people’s expertise.

Writing is a communication.