I sent The World Well Lost to one editor who rejected it on sight, and then wrote a letter to every other editor in the field warning them against the story, and urging them to reject it on sight without reading it.
Ninety percent of everything is crap.
The movers and shakers have always been obsessive nuts.
I feel angry that I can't be hypnotized. I'm not putting it down, and I'm not saying that it doesn't exist. I have talked to a great many people who are very good at it, but so far nobody has ever been able to hypnotize me.
The story of my very first sale is the fact that I dreamed up a foolproof paper to cheat an insurance company out of several hundred thousand dollars.
I find to my mixed astonishment that I do dream, but I didn't know it.
Inner space is so much more interesting, because outer space is so empty.
Once I had all the facts in, I found I didn't have the immoral courage to pull the caper. So I wrote it as a story. As a teenager, I didn't have any skills for writing as such, so it came out in 1500 words.
The first writing I did was short short stories for a newspaper syndicate for which I was paid five dollars a piece on publication.