“Sometimes lost in a book, you forget which is the real world and which is fiction.”

“Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.”

“We care about moral issues, nobility, decency, happiness, goodness—the issues that matter in the real world, but which can only be addressed, in their purity, in fiction.”

“There's no real objection to escapism, in the right places... We all want to escape occasionally. But science fiction is often very far from escapism, in fact you might say that science fiction is escape into reality... It's a fiction which does concern itself with real issues: the origin of man; our future. In fact I can't think of any form of literature which is more concerned with real issues, reality.”

“If you will practice being fictional for a while, you will understand that fictional characters are sometimes more real than people with bodies and heartbeats.”

“A lie, sometimes, can be truer than the truth, which is why fiction gets written.”