When I was quite young, she was working in a hardware store, so I grew up knowing about hardware.

I regarded drugs as somewhat like rattlesnakes - it's possible to pick one up without getting bit, but why bother?

I grew up in a broken home, working class. My paternal grandmother raised me and my brother; my father was with us, and my mother lived in Jersey.

The fellow that owns his own house is always just coming out of a hardware store

My personal feeling about science fiction is that it's always in some way connected to the real world, to our everyday world.

You can also make explicit certain social problems which, again, would be prejudged or not encountered at all in real life, because people have set up defenses against it. Fantasy allows you to get past defenses.