Science fiction at its best should be crazy and dangerous, not sane and safe.

Experience is the only subject worthwhile of study.

You ought to write grateful gratitude every day.

I still suspect that most people start out with some kind of ability to tell a story but that it gets lost along the way. Of course, the ability to create life with words is essentially a gift. If you have it in the first place, you can develop it; if you don't have it, you might as well forget it.But I have found that people who don't have it are frequently the ones hell-bent on writing stories. I'm sure anyway that they are the ones who write the books and the magazine articles on how-to-write-short-stories. I have a friend who is taking a correspondence course in this subject, and she has passed a few of the chapter headings on to me—such as, 'The Story Formula for Writers,' 'How to Create Characters,' 'Let's Plot!' This form of corruption is costing her twenty-seven dollars.