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.

That writer does the most who gives his reader the most knowledge and takes from him the least time.

It's part of a writer's profession as it's part of a spy's profession to prey on the community to which he's attached to take away information - often in secret - and to translate that into intelligence for his masters whether it's his readership or his spy masters. And I think that both professions are perhaps rather lonely.

The travel writer seeks the world we have lost - the lost valleys of the imagination.

Richard Hugo taught me that anyone with a desire to write an ear for language and a bit of imagination could become a writer. He also in a way gave me permission to write about northern Montana.

It's definitely true that there are a lot of the devices we used on 'Star Trek ' that came out the imagination of the writers and the creators that are actually in the world today.

The really great writers are people like Emily Bronte who sit in a room and write out of their limited experience and unlimited imagination.

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.

Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.

Someone once said that history has more imagination than all the scenario writers in the Pentagon and we have a lot of scenario writers here. No one ever wrote a scenario for commercial airliners crashing into the World Trade Center.