As a Humanist, I love science. I hate superstition, which could never have given us A-bombs.
— Kurt Vonnegut
I had no talent for science. What was infinitely worse: all my fraternity brothers were engineers.
What troubles me most about my lovely country is that its children are seldom taught that American freedom will vanish, if, when they grow up, and in the exercise of their duties as citizens, they insist that our courts and policemen and prisons be guided by divine or natural law.
It may be that the most striking thing about members of my literary generation in retrospect will be that we were allowed to say absolutely anything without fear of punishment.
I now make my living by being impolite. I am clumsy at it.
If you appear in the 'Atlantic' or 'Harper's' or the 'New Yorker,' by God, you must be a writer, because everybody says so.
I hope to build a reputation as a science-fiction writer. That's the pitch. We'll see.
I have no degree in biochemistry, neither do I have one in mechanical engineering, as the Army saw fit to terminate both courses before they were finished.
A chaplain's assistant is customarily a figure of fun in the American Army.
I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.
When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.
There is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look.
There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia.
Actually, to be an effective person politically in this country, I think you have to be thirty or over, and also you have to be rich, well-placed, you have to be close to power. And I don't think that young people, because they look young, can do much, as I think they are counterproductive.
I get up at 7:30 and work four hours a day. Nine to twelve in the morning, five to six in the evening. Businessmen would achieve better results if they studied human metabolism. No one works well eight hours a day. No one ought to work more than four hours.
I think a lot of people, including me, clammed up when a civilian asked about battle, about war. It was fashionable. One of the most impressive ways to tell your war story is to refuse to tell it, you know. Civilians would then have to imagine all kinds of deeds of derring-do.
Evolution can go to hell as far as I am concerned. What a mistake we are. We have mortally wounded this sweet life-supporting planet - the only one in the whole Milky Way - with a century of transportation whoopee.
Science sent the Hubble telescope out into space, so it could capture light and the absence thereof, from the very beginning of time. And the telescope really did that. So now we know that there was once absolutely nothing, such a perfect nothing that there wasn't even nothing or once.
Oh, sure, we have another world war coming, and another great depression, but where are the leaders this time?
There is never a shortage anywhere of lawyers eager to attack the First Amendment, as though it were nothing more than a clause in a lease from a crooked slumlord.
I think I belong to America's last generation of novelists. Novelists will come one by one from now on, not in seeming families, and will perhaps write only one or two novels, and let it go at that.
I think big business is a terrible thing for the spirit of the country, as our spirit is the best thing about us.
This is Sunday, and the question arises, what'll I start tomorrow?
My cash cows, the slick magazines, were put out of business by TV.
I was not an anthropology student prior to the war. I took it up as part of a personal readjustment following some bewildering experiences as an infantryman and later as a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany. The science of the Study of Man has been extremely satisfactory from that personal standpoint.
Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.
I let the dog out, or I let him in, and we talk some. I let him know I like him, and he lets me know he likes me.
Science is magic that works.
Anything can make me stop and look and wonder, and sometimes learn.
Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself. But mankind wasn't always so lucky. Less than a century ago, men and women did not have easy access to the puzzle boxes within them.
I'm screamingly funny, you know, I really am in the books. And that helps because I'm funnier than a lot of people, I think, and that's appreciated by young people.
I don't plot my books rigidly, follow a preconceived structure. A novel mustn't be a closed system - it's a quest.
I was a chemistry major, but I'm always winding up as a teacher in English departments, so I've brought scientific thinking to literature. There's been very little gratitude for this.
I consider anybody a twerp who hasn't read 'Democracy in America' by Alexis de Tocqueville. There can never be a better book than that one on the strengths and vulnerabilities inherent in our form of government.
I am honorary President of the American Humanist Society, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that utterly functionless capacity. We Humanists behave as well as we can, without any rewards or punishments in an Afterlife.
That is how you get to be a writer, incidentally: you feel somehow marginal, somehow slightly off-balance all the time.
If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own.
It is a big temptation to me, when I create a character for a novel, to say that he is what he is because of faulty wiring, or because of microscopic amounts of chemicals which he ate or failed to eat on that particular day.
This country is being managed to death, being public related to death.
I'm convinced that no one can amount to a damn in the arts if he becomes sweetly reasonable, seeing all sides of a picture, forgiving all sins.
I left the Middle West for Schenectady because the General Electric Company offered me a more congenial, better paying job than did anyone else.
All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is.
People aren't supposed to look back. I'm certainly not going to do it anymore.
Over the years, people I've met have often asked me what I'm working on, and I've usually replied that the main thing was a book about Dresden.
Never index your own book.
Puny man can do nothing at all to help or please God Almighty, and Luck is not the hand of God.
All writers are going to have to learn more about science, because it's such an interesting part of their environment.
People need good lies. There are too many bad ones.
During most of my freelancing, I made what I would have made in charge of the cafeteria at a pretty good junior-high school.
I am from a family of artists. Here I am, making a living in the arts. It has not been a rebellion. It's as though I had taken over the family Esso station.
