“Wells is teaching us to think. Burroughs and his lesser imitators are teaching us not to think. Of course, Burroughs is teaching us to wonder. The sense of wonder is in essence a religious state, b...”

“We can no longer believe that after death, if we have sinned, we shall enter hell. Hell has been acted out here on Earth in the time of Nazi Germany, when even the innocent went in their millions t...”

“An overcrowded world is the ideal place in which to be lonely.”

“When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults and they enter society, one of the politer names of hell. That is why we dread children, even if we love them. They show us the state of our decay.”

“The fatal error of much science fiction has been to subscribe to an optimism based on the idea that revolution, or a new gimmick, or a bunch of strong men, or an invasion of aliens, or the conquest...”

“Science fiction is for real, space opera is for fun.”

“[We let] the universality of fantasy, of once upon a time, allow escapist fiction to be more than just that - to also bring us home.”

“The misfortune of a young man who returns to his native land after years away is that he finds his native land foreign; whereas the lands he left behind remain for ever like a mirage in his mind.Ho...”

“For it is in the millions of small melodies that the truth of history is always found, for history only matters because of the effects we see or imagine in the lives of the ordinary people who are ...”

“If Im perplexed by the fact that Im constantly lost, maybe somewhere in my head Ive determined that being lost serves a greater purpose than being found.”

“I seem to be torn between 'I wish we'd met earlier' and 'I wish we'd never met'.”

“But what if hope had a threshold? What if there was a limit to it? What if each of us was only given a certain amount and mine was used up?”

“Is there magic in this world? Certainly! But it is not the kind of magic written about in fantasy stories. It is the kind of magic that comes from ideas and the hard work it often takes to make the...”

“We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.”

“A culture of unaccountability is a culture without incentive, and a culture without incentive is the death of critical and creative thinking.”