“I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled "science fiction" ... and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.”

“The gourney, the big file drawers of the dead, the instruments of dissection - this sure looked like the morgues in the movies. Something had gone seriously wrong while she slept.”

“I have been to the world's end and back and now I know what I would put in my bottom drawer. I would put my sisters.”

“It was okay to give up. I'd been brave. Everyone would say so. And yet...even as I opened a dresser drawer and figured out which things I would take with me in this hypothetical scenario, I remembered the problem. There would still be ghosts. I would still have a future.”

“When I began to write fiction that I knew would be published as science fiction, [and] part of what I brought to it was the critical knowledge that science fiction was always about the period in which it was written.”

“On Memory: Imagine a desk covered with papers. That is everything you are thinking about. Now imagine a stack of file drawers behind it. That is everything you know. The trick is to keep the desk and the file drawers as close to one another as possible, and the papers neatly stacked.”