The problem isn't to learn to love humanity, but to learn to love those members of it who happen to be at hand..

You meet a new person, you go with him and suddenly you get a whole new city...you go down new streets, you see houses you never saw before, pass pla….

It is not that love sometimes makes mistakes, but that it is, essentially, a mistake. We fall in love when our imagination projects nonexistent perfe….

Endings to be useful must be inconclusive..

The truth is always multiplex..

The artist has some internal experience that produces a poem, a painting, a piece of music. Spectators submit themselves to the work, which generates….

The past is what makes now like now makes tomorrow..

Science fiction doesn’t try to predict the future, but rather offers a significant distortion of the present…We sit around and look at what we see ar….

It’s a very new, not to mention vulgar, idea that the spectator’s experience should be identical to, or even have anything to do with, the artist’s..

The only important elements in any society are the artistic and the criminal, because they alone, by questioning the society’s values, can force it t….

It is a magic book. Words mean things. When you put them together they speak. Yes, sometimes they flatten out and nothing they say is real, and that ….

Good writing is clear. Talented writing is energetic. Good writing avoids errors. Talented writing makes things happen in the reader's mind - -vividl….

Don't go chattering to the stars if you're going to do it with your eyes closed..

I still believe pattern fascinates on its own. And three-sevenths of a pattern, or even a smaller fragment, can fascinate still more--get us really h….

But I realized something. About art. And psychiatry. They're both self-perpetuating systems. Like religion. All three of them promise you a sense of ….

Science fiction isn’t just thinking about the world out there. It’s also thinking about how that world might be—a particularly important exercise for….

The night ... it is filled with bestial watchmen, trammeling the extremities and the interstices of the timeless city, portents fallen, constellated ….

It's only ... when we're stripped of purpose that we know who we are..

Apocalypse has come and gone. We're just grubbing in the ashes..

It is easier to argue that something nobody believes in actually exists than it is to argue that something everybody believes in is unreal..

Everyone in a position of authority is hysterical, and everyone else is pretending to be asleep..