When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money.Collection: Graduation
We've gotta reinvest in space travel. We should've never left the moon.Collection: Space
Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.Collection: Morning
If you dream the proper dreams, and share the myths with people, they will want to grow up to be like you.Collection: Dreams
Video games are a waste of time for men with nothing else to do. Real brains don't do that.Collection: Time
There is too much government today. We've got to remember the government should be by the people, of the people, and for the people.Collection: Government
I know you've heard it a thousand times before. But it's true - hard work pays off. If you want to be good, you have to practice, practice, practice. If you don't love something, then don't do it.Collection: Work
If we listened to our intellect, we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go into business, because we'd be cynical. Well, that's nonsense. You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.Collection: Intelligence
My religion encompasses all religions. I believe in God, I believe in the universe. I believe you are god, I believe I am god; I believe the earth is god and the universe is god. We're all god.Collection: Religion
If you want to find the source of much of the music of modern day Russia, you will find it in the incredible compositions of that crazed lunatic Berlioz.Collection: Music
If you are going to describe the history of animation, you'd look at the early Disney work, then 'Bugs Bunny,' 'Road Runner' and other Warner Brothers theatrical productions. But when you got to 'Rocky and Bullwinkle,' you'd see they were unique: They assumed you had a brain in your head.Collection: History
I don't try to describe the future. I try to prevent it.Collection: Future
Collecting facts is important. Knowledge is important. But if you don't have an imagination to use the knowledge, civilization is nowhere.Collection: Knowledge
The great fun in my life has been getting up every morning and rushing to the typewriter because some new idea has hit me.Collection: Morning
My business is to prevent the future.Collection: Future
We are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will. Incredible. The Life Force experimenting with forms. You for one. Me for another. The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts.Collection: Imagination
Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spent the rest of the day putting the pieces together.Collection: Morning
The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance - the idea that anything is possible.Collection: Science
Touch a scientist and you touch a child.Collection: Science
Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn't exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.Collection: Science
There's no one way to be creative. Any old way will work.Collection: Work
I'm never going to go to Mars, but I've helped inspire, thank goodness, the people who built the rockets and sent our photographic equipment off to Mars.Collection: Space
Living at risk is jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down.Collection: Chance
A book has got smell. A new book smells great. An old book smells even better. An old book smells like ancient Egypt.Collection: Great
When I was seven or eight years old, I began to read the science-fiction magazines that were brought by guests into my grandparents' boarding house in Waukegan, Illinois. Those were the years when Hugo Gernsback was publishing 'Amazing Stories,' with vivid, appallingly imaginative cover paintings that fed my hungry imagination.Collection: Amazing
Any experience that touches you, in any particular way, is good. It can be a horrible experience.Collection: Experience
Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.Collection: Future
I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it's better than college. People should educate themselves - you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I'd written a thousand stories.Collection: Money
Everything is generated through your own will power.Collection: Power
Jump, and you will find out how to unfold your wings as you fall.Collection: Courage
Everybody has forgotten that Russia helped start the Second World War.Collection: War
We've gotta become the Martians. I'm a Martian - I tell you to become Martians. And we've gotta go to Mars and civilize Mars and build a whole civilization on Mars and then move out, 300 years from now into the universe. And when we do that, we have a chance of living forever.Collection: Chance
If you know how to read, you have a complete education about life, then you know how to vote within a democracy. But if you don't know how to read, you don't know how to decide. That's the great thing about our country - we're a democracy of readers, and we should keep it that way.Collection: Education
Millions of students now, in all the schools of America, are reading science fiction and especially, thank God, 'The Martian Chronicles.'Collection: Science
I hate all politics. I don't like either political party. One should not belong to them - one should be an individual, standing in the middle. Anyone that belongs to a party stops thinking.Collection: Politics
Scientists have to have a metaphor. All scientists start with imagination.Collection: Imagination
In Hollywood, they think they know it all. You, as a writer, are essentially an outsider. Novelists and short-story writers, especially.
You pay a certain penalty for going your own way. A lot of people think you're nuts, and you're not as popular with girls as you should be.
Americans are far more remarkable than we give ourselves credit for. We've been so busy damning ourselves for years. We've done it all, and yet we don't take credit for it.
Love is easy, and I love writing. You can't resist love. You get an idea, someone says something, and you're in love.
In my later years, I have looked in the mirror each day and found a happy person staring back. Occasionally I wonder why I can be so happy. The answer is that every day of my life I've worked only for myself and for the joy that comes from writing and creating. The image in my mirror is not optimistic, but the result of optimal behavior.