As far as I'm concerned, I didn't dream - ever.

It wasn’t real conservatism at all, of course, but an unthought longing for the dear old days when one could predict what would be there tomorrow, if not next week. Unable to get the big picture, they welcomed the conveniences, the miniaturization of this and the speed of that, and then they were angrily confused when their support of these things changed their world.

As far as hypnosis is concerned, I had a very serious problem when I was in my twenties. I encountered a man who later became the president of the American Society of Medical Hypnosis. He couldn’t hypnotize me.

The novels were all right for a while until she found out that most of them were like the movies – all about the pretty ones who really own the world.

I have lived most of my life with the conviction that I don’t dream, because I never could retrieve a dream.

I’ve hung around in absolute exhaustion and starvation waiting for an idea to hit, which might have been months. I’ve talked things over with editors, found out what they wanted, and when they wanted it delivered.

Sitting there most of the night,” she said, “I had a crazy kind of image. Do you think two sick twisted ’trees ever made bonsai out of one another?

When I can’t do something, this always impels me to study it.

For years, I thought I simply didn’t dream. I felt left out. Everybody else had a thing I didn’t have.

Some major writers have a huge impact, like Ayn Rand, who to my mind is a lousy fiction writer because her writing has no compassion and virtually no humor. She has a philosophical and economical message that she is passing off as fiction, but it really isn’t fiction at all.