Keep your eyes on the stars, and your feet on the ground.
Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It's a way of understanding it.
Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It's a way of understanding it.
Cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can’t fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.
Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.
If opportunity doesn’t knock, build a door.
All readers come to fiction as willing accomplices to your lies. Such is the basic goodwill contract made the moment we pick up a work of fiction.
Failure will never overtake me if my determination to succeed is strong enough.
I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose.
A mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge.
“We are all inventors, each sailing out on a voyage of discovery, guided each by a private chart, of which there is no duplicate. The world is all gates, all opportunities.
If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.
There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
Inspiration is a guest that does not willingly visit the lazy.
To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.
Health is the greatest gift, contentment the greatest wealth, faithfulness the best relationship.
To live a creative life we must first lose the fear of being wrong.
Two roads diverged in a wood and I - I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.
How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence.
Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.
A writer without interest or sympathy for the foibles of his fellow man is not conceivable as a writer.
A writer can do nothing for men more necessary, satisfying, than just simply to reveal to them the infinite possibilities of their own souls.
Start by doing what's necessary; then do what's possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible.
I really think that if there’s any one enemy to human creativity, especially creative writing, it’s self-consciousness.