“To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength.”

“It is untrue that fiction is nonutilitarian. The uses of fiction are synonymous with the uses of literature. They include refreshment, clarification of life, self-awareness, expansion of our range of experiences, and enlargement of our sense of understanding and discovery, perception, intensification, expression, beauty , and understanding. Like literature generally, fiction is a form of discovery, perception, intensification, expression, beauty, and understanding. If it is all these things, the question of whether it is a legitimate use of time should not even arise.”

“Writers (of supernatural fiction), who used to strive for awe and achieve fear, now strive for fear and achieve only disgust.”

“Fiction is true. It doesn’t have to factual to be true.”

“As often I have been a science fiction writer writing science fiction for the community of science fiction readers, I am also, for good or ill, an American writing American literature to an American audience. Most fundamentally, though, I am a human being writing human literature to a human audience.”

“Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.”