“Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.”
“If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.”
“Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.”
“Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.”
“I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled ''Science Fiction'' and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.”
“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.”
“What the hell is nostalgia doing in a science-fiction film? With the whole universe and all the future to play in, Lucas took his marvelous toys and crawled under the fringed cloth on the parlor table, back into a nice safe hide hole, along with Flash Gordon and the Cowardly Lion and Luke Skywalker and the Flying Aces and the Hitler Jugend. If there's a message there, I don't think I want to hear it.”
“Where everything is possible miracles become commonplaces, but the familiar ceases to be self-evident.”
“Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.”
“The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.”
“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.”
“In sci-fi convention, life-forms that hadn't developed space travel were mere prehistory -- horse-shoe crabs of the cosmic scene -- and something of the humiliation of being stuck on a provincial planet in a galactic backwater has stayed with me ever since.”