“What society refuses to see is what most strongly defines it.”

The Expanding Universe (1963)
Context: Because of the very nature of the world as it is today our children receive in school a heavy load of scientific and analytic subjects, so it is in their reading for fun, for pleasure, that they must be guided into creativity. There are forces working in the world as never before in the history of mankind for standardization, for the regimentation of us all, or what I like to call making muffins of us, muffins all like every other muffin in the muffin tin. This is the limited universe, the drying, dissipating universe, that we can help our children avoid by providing them with “explosive material capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly.”
So how do we do it? We can’t just sit down at our typewriters an turn out explosive material. I took a course in college on Chaucer, one of the most explosive, imaginative, and far-reaching in influence of all writers. And I’ll never forget going to the final exam and being asked why Chaucer used certain verbal devices, certain adjectives, why he had certain characters behave in certain ways. And I wrote in a white heat of fury, “I don’t think Chaucer had any idea why he did any of these thing. That isn’t the way people write.”
I believe this as strongly now as I did then. Most of what is best in writing isn’t done deliberately.

"On the Ignorance of the Learned"
Table Talk: Essays On Men And Manners http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Essays/TableHazIV.htm (1821-1822)

Source: Hainish Cycle, (1974), Chapter 6 (p. 165)

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-genius-of-warren-buffett-in-23-quotes-2015-08-19 "The genius of Warren Buffett in 23 quotes" MarketWatch (19 August 2015)
Quotes from the press

Original in French:
Il y a des imbéciles qui définissent mon œuvre comme abstraite, pourtant ce qu'ils qualifient d'abstrait est ce qu'il y a de plus réaliste, ce qui est réel n'est pas l'apparence mais l'idée, l'essence des choses.
Caiete Silvane magazine, 2008-11-01, Sculptura pe Internet http://www.caietesilvane.ro/indexcs.php?cmd=articol&idart=232,

Source: Socialism: Past and Future (1989), p.67

In an interview for the BBC (January 2002)

Microsoft's Surface Phone Could Be The Ultimate Mobile Device http://forbes.com/sites/ewanspence/2016/11/24/microsoft-surface-phone-rumor-leak-ceo-satya-nadella in Forbes (24 November 2016)

Source: The Tales of Alvin Maker, The Crystal City (2003), Chapter 16 “Labor” (p. 307).