Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
There is no cause so good or noble that it will not attract fuggheads; and the fuggheads will get all the press.
Hopeless causes are the only ones worth fighting for. The fight for the taxpayer is the most hopeless of them all.
The human species really could have faced global thermonuclear war. During seventy years of Cold War we grew used to it.
The Product of Freedom and Security is a constant (F X S = k). Giving up freedom for security is beginning to look naive.
Jesus Pietro wasn't used to dealing with ghosts. It would require brand new techniques. Grimly he set out to evolve them.
Boredom is my worst enemy. It's killed a lot of my friends, but it won't get me. When I get bored, I go risk my life somewhere.
One mark of a good officer, he remembered, was the ability to make quick decisions. If they happen to be right, so much the better.
The best advice I was ever given was on my twenty-first birthday when my father said, Son, here's a million dollars. Don't lose it.
I have a kind of psychic invisibility. As long as I can stay scared, I can keep people from seeing me. That's what we have to count on.
Love was a delicious blend of warm and cold. There was comfort in making love. It solved no problems: but one could run away from problems.
I am trying to prevent a bloodbath. Is that clear enough for you? I'm trying to prevent a civil war that could kill half the people in this world.
You learn by writing short stories. Keep writing short stories. The money's in novels, but writing short stories keeps your writing lean and pointed.
There is a technical, literary term for those who mistake the opinions and beliefs of characters in a novel for those of the author. The term is 'idiot'.
Bruce Sterling is one terrific writer and he's relatively new, but I don't know how long he's been doing it; he probably doesn't need the publicity anymore!
Species evolve to meet the environment. An intelligent species changes the environment to suit itself. As soon as a species becomes intelligent, it should stop evolving.
Consider the true picture. Think of myriads of tiny bubbles, very sparsely scattered, rising through a vast black sea. We rule some of the bubbles. Of the waters we know nothing.
SF isn't a genre; SF is the matrix in which genres are embedded, and because the SF field is never going in any one direction at any one time, there is hardly a way to cut it off.
It's very difficult for a black man to get out of South-Central Los Angeles, and get out civilized....The only men I know who have escaped, all began reading Robert Heinlein at age ten.
We need to take command of the solar system to gain that wealth, and to escape the sea of paper our government is becoming, and for some decent chance of stopping a Dinosaur Killer asteroid.
I'd visit the near future, close enough that someone might want to talk to Larry Niven and can figure out the language; distant enough to get me decent medical techniques and a ticket to the Moon.
As for AIDS, it's a plague. We are human, we get plagues. They come along every so often, kill off two thirds of the population; in the next generation it's a quarter; after that it's a childhood disease.
Spray a book with insect spray, drop it in a bag, add some mothballs and seal it. Put it in another bag and seal it. Another. The packages piled up on the floor, each a book sealed in four plastic envelopes.
The brightest minds in our field have been trying to find a definition of science fiction for these past seventy years. The short answer is, science fiction stories are given as possible, not necessarily here and now, but somewhere, sometime.
Once every hundred years, the Los Angeles smog rolls away for a single night, leaving the air as clean as interstellar space. That way the gods can see if Los Angeles is still there. If it is, they roll the smog back so they won't have to look at it.
The reader has certain rights. He bought your story. Think of this as an implicit contract. He's entitled to be entertained, instructed, amused; maybe all three. If he quits in the middle, or puts the book down feeling his time has been wasted, you're in violation.
There were timelines branching and branching, a mega-universe of universes, millions more every minute. Billions? Trillions? The universe split every time someone made a decision. Split, so that every decision ever made could go both ways. Every choice made by every man, woman, and child was reversed in the universe next door.
For each human being there is an optimum ratio between change and stasis. Too little change, he grows bored. Too little stability, he panics and loses his ability to adapt. One who marries six times in ten years won't change jobs. One who moves often to serve his company will maintain a stable marriage. A woman chained to one home and family may redecorate frantically or take a lover or go to many costume parties.
There had been a popular joke on Freedom, started by a man named Calder. Looking down from space, he had said, the dominant life forms on Earth were obviously the cereals and other grasses. They occupied all the most desirable and fertile land; and they had tamed insects and animals to care for them. In particular, they had domesticated the bipeds to nurture and cultivate them and to save and plant their seed. Now, watching the farmers, Alex could easily imagine that they were worshiping and genuflecting before their masters.