I don't read other science fiction. I don't read any at all.

Right now I'm so old that if I had a big gush of money, I don't know what I'd do with it. I don't travel anymore. I don't need anything, don't want anything. I'd give it to my son, I guess, and let him enjoy it.

These are just the tip of the iceberg, because I read and read and read. I read everything.

I was a carpenter for a time and everybody watches what you do.

Sometimes some of these little side excursions are useful and I manage to fit them in the book somewhere.

I'd never been published when I was young.

But I'm so slow on it because I find it terribly hard writing blind on computers. The computer speaks to me, but it's just so slow, I'm so terribly slow using it.

A reader is not supposed to be aware that someone's written the story. He's supposed to be completely immersed, submerged in the environment.

I just wrote what I felt like writing since they seemed to sell.

There was a writer in the '20s called Christopher Morley, who I remember a little bit of, who had some influence on me, but I couldn't tell you what it was.

I do read books. I suppose it's more or less the same thing, but at least I'm alone and I'm an individual. I can stop anytime I want, which I frequently do.

I haven't been to a movie since somebody gave me free tickets to Star Wars, which I went to.

I never worked in an office in my life.

I thought that automobiles were going to have mufflers and go fast and airplanes were going to fly fast.

I haven't sold to the movies. In other words, I haven't gotten any enormous checks yet.

It seems to limit you; when you're working in an office, you're a creature in a small cell under somebody's supervision and surveillance.

But I've sure worked at jobs where I have been under inspection.

I never made lots of money at it, but I sold enough.

This flattery has been rather slow in coming. I think all of sudden late in life now I'm getting some credit for what I've done. Which is gratifying, but it's kind of a little late.

I worked for half a cent a word. I'm not a fast writer to begin with, so for the first few years I had do other things.

I was an omnivore at reading, so that everything I ever read contributed.

But Roy Rockwood, it was science fiction for the sake of science fiction.

I don't read other science fiction. I don't read any at all.

In fact, almost every job you get somebody watching you.

As I mentioned, I was a carpenter for a time.

The story was such that I couldn't make a graceful ending and then make a graceful new beginning. I could have, but I didn't want to. So, it isn't the most graceful way of writing a story. This new story is, I think, is pretty good stuff. I'm pleased with it anyway.

Then there was Clark Ashton Smith, who wrote for Weird Tales and who had a wild imagination. He wasn't a very talented writer, but his imagination was wonderful.

So I'll write it, and then I'll find out that I actually wrote something that is utterly useless. You can't use it in the story and it doesn't fit. So I just throw it away. I've done that countless times.

But, for instance, when I was awfully young, I read all the Oz books. They were an enormous influence on me.

I got done writing Ports of Call and suddenly realized I have far too much material for the book.

Well, I think everything I've ever read contributes to the background from which I write.

Happiness is fugitive dissatisfaction and boredom are real.

Freedom, privileges, options, must constantly be exercised, even at the risk of inconvenience.

I don't really have special rituals, but I don't try to write fiction unless I have a minimum of a few hours. For me, it takes a while to settle into a mode where I'm truly concentrating.

The fact that it's science fiction gives you the license to do anything you want to do.

For someone who writes fiction, in order to activate the imagination and the unconscious, it's essential to be free.

Fiction came quite a while later. I began with short stories and fiction for children.

Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.

I'd have been a filmmaker or a cartoonist or something else which extended from the visual arts into the making of narratives if I hadn't been able to shift into fiction.

For truth is always strange; stranger than fiction.

We were given clear concrete tools. The course did a great job demystifying the art of fiction writing and fostering confidence. The instructor brought complex concepts down to earth. I will miss coming here every week.

The biographies and autobiographies are on the whole more impressive than the fiction of the last two decades, but the freakish best sellers among them are least likely to withstand the test of time.

I have never been a critic of science fiction as a whole.

Fiction was invented the day Jonas arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale.

I think if I had been writing fiction, where the work is entirely dependent on the writer's creativity and the potential directions the narrative might take are infinite, I might have frozen.

I have always loved science fiction. One of my favorite shows is 'Star Trek.' I like the trips, where it drops my mind off, because they give you a premise and all of a sudden, you say, 'Oh!' and I'm fascinated by it.

I spent several years acquiring the obsessive, day-to-day discipline that's needed if you want to write professionally, then several more, highly valuable years studying fiction writing at the University of Iowa.

For people who have no critical acumen, a state is a mythical entity, for those who think critically it is a rational fiction, created by man in order to facilitate human coexistence.

There is an element of autobiography in all fiction in that pain or distress, or pleasure, is based on the author's own. But in my case that is as far as it goes.