Every Time You Take A Step, Even

I Am A Librarian. I Discovered Me In The Library. I Went To Find Me In The Library. Before I Fell In Love With Libraries, I Was Just A Six-year-old Boy. The Library Fueled All Of My Curiosities, From Dinosaurs To Ancient Egypt. When I Graduated From High School In 1938, I Began Going To The Library Three Nights A Week. I Did This Every Week For Almost Ten Years And Finally, In 1947, Around The Time I Got Married, I Figured I Was Done. So I Graduated From The Library When I Was Twenty-seven. I Discovered That The Library Is The Real School.

The Reason I Shift Gears Constantly, Why I'm Doing An Opera, Why I've Done Essays, Why I've Written Poetry For Years That Nobody Wanted, Why I Do Short Stories And Novels And Screenplays... Is So I Will Have New Ways Of Failing. This Means Becoming A Student Again.

The Magic Is Only In What Books Say, How They Stitched The Patches Of The Universe Together Into One Garment For Us.

As A Result Of Reading Science Fiction When I Was Eight, I Grew Up With An Interest In Music, Architecture, City Planning, Transportation, Politics, Ethics, Aesthetics On Any Level, Art...it's Just Total! It's A Complete Commitment To The Whole Human Race On All The Earth. That's What Science Fiction Is About.

Death Doesn't Exist. It Never Did, It Never Will. But We've Drawn So Many Pictures Of It, So Many Years, Trying To Pin It Down, Comprehend It, We've Got To Thinking Of It As An Entity, Strangely Alive And Greedy. All It Is, However, Is A Stopped Watch, A Loss, An End, A Darkness. Nothing.