“If you can’t outargue the other fellow, sometimes you can outlive him.”

Source: Ender's Game

The Paris Review interview (2010)
Context: Three things are in your head: First, everything you have experienced from the day of your birth until right now. Every single second, every single hour, every single day. Then, how you reacted to those events in the minute of their happening, whether they were disastrous or joyful. Those are two things you have in your mind to give you material. Then, separate from the living experiences are all the art experiences you’ve had, the things you’ve learned from other writers, artists, poets, film directors, and composers. So all of this is in your mind as a fabulous mulch and you have to bring it out. How do you do that? I did it by making lists of nouns and then asking, What does each noun mean? You can go and make up your own list right now and it would be different than mine. The night. The crickets. The train whistle. The basement. The attic. The tennis shoes. The fireworks. All these things are very personal. Then, when you get the list down, you begin to word-associate around it. You ask, Why did I put this word down? What does it mean to me? Why did I put this noun down and not some other word? Do this and you’re on your way to being a good writer. You can’t write for other people. You can’t write for the left or the right, this religion or that religion, or this belief or that belief. You have to write the way you see things.

Jitterbug Perfume (1984)

Source: Sweet Trouble

Part III, The Mayors, section 1; originally published as “Bridle and Saddle” in Astounding (June 1942)
The Foundation series (1951–1993), Foundation (1951)

The Fantastic Imagination (1893)
Source: A Dish of Orts
Context: A fairytale, a sonata, a gathering storm, a limitless night, seizes you and sweeps you away: do you begin at once to wrestle with it and ask whence its power over you, whither it is carrying you? The law of each is in the mind of its composer; that law makes one man feel this way, another man feel that way. To one the sonata is a world of odour and beauty, to another of soothing only and sweetness. To one, the cloudy rendezvous is a wild dance, with a terror at its heart; to another, a majestic march of heavenly hosts, with Truth in their centre pointing their course, but as yet restraining her voice. The greatest forces lie in the region of the uncomprehended.
I will go farther. The best thing you can do for your fellow, next to rousing his conscience, is — not to give him things to think about, but to wake things up that are in him; or say, to make him think things for himself. The best Nature does for us is to work in us such moods in which thoughts of high import arise. Does any aspect of Nature wake but one thought? Does she ever suggest only one definite thing? Does she make any two men in the same place at the same moment think the same thing? Is she therefore a failure, because she is not definite? Is it nothing that she rouses the something deeper than the understanding — the power that underlies thoughts? Does she not set feeling, and so thinking at work? Would it be better that she did this after one fashion and not after many fashions? Nature is mood-engendering, thought-provoking: such ought the sonata, such ought the fairytale to be.

Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886)

Cavett http://books.google.com/books?id=CE4NAQAAMAAJ&q=%22You+can+after+all+reduce+the+reasons+for+watching+TV+to+but+two+to+be+lulled+and+to+be+stimulated+Some+people+do+one+sometimes+the+other+sometimes+Some+people+do+all+of+one+or+all+of+the+other%22&pg=PA331#v=onepage, co-authored with Christopher Porterfield (1974)
Excerpted in New York magazine July 22, 1974 http://books.google.com/books?id=kekCAAAAMBAJ&q=%22You+can+after+all+reduce+the+reasons+for+watching+TV+to%22+%22two+to+be+lulled+and+to+be+stimulated+Some+people+do+one+sometimes+the+other+sometimes+Some+people+do+all+of+one+or+all+of+the+other%22&pg=PA34#v=onepage