"Every life is narrow. Our only escape is not to run away, but to learn to love the people we are and the world in which we find ourselves."

"I think one of the things you have to learn if you're going to create believable characters is never to make generalizations about groups of people."

"For me, disability is a way of getting some extremity, some kind of very difficult situation, that throws an interesting light on people."

"Humour and high seriousness... Perfect bedfellows, I think. Though I usually phrase it in terms of comedy and darkness. Comedy without darkness rapidly becomes trivial. And darkness without comedy rapidly becomes unbearable."

"Science is not addressed to poets."

"Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today - but the core of science fiction, its essence has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all."

"When you're looking that far out, you're giving people their place in the universe, it touches people. Science is often visual, so it doesn't need translation. It's like poetry, it touches you."

"You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean."