“I've always loved science fiction. I think the smartest writers are science fiction writers dealing with major things.” – Associated Press interview, 12-7-11”

“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.”

“Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful.”

“Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.”

“Me, I have a science fiction writer's conviction that the damn robot is supposed to speakhuman, not the other way around.”

“I became a so-called science fiction writer when someone decreed that I was a science fiction writer. I did not want to be classified as one, so I wondered in what way I'd offended that I would not get credit for being a serious writer. I decided that it was because I wrote about technology, and most fine American writers know nothing about technology. I got classified as a science fiction writer simply because I wrote about Schenectady, New York. My first book, Player Piano, was about Schenectady. There are huge factories in Schenectady and nothing else. I and my associates were engineers, physicists, chemists, and mathematicians. And when I wrote about the General Electric Company and Schenectady, it seemed a fantasy of the future to critics who had never seen the place.”