Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Honor does not have to be defended.
Virtual reality is just air guitar writ large.
Psychopathy might lurk behind the mask of sanity.
You can't choose the ways in which you'll be tested.
In the best atheist sense of the word, I feel blessed.
Secrecy was the problem; transparency the obvious cure.
Sci-fi is just as much about social science as technology.
A short story is one idea; a novel is a whole soup of them.
General principles should not be based on exceptional cases.
Not wanting to die was another universal constant, it seemed.
The fact we exist merely means we exist. That's all it means.
Learning to ignore things is one of the great paths to inner peace.
When you're changing centuries, people get curious about the future.
Print science fiction writers often do consulting for government bodies.
I would love to write more about my hardboiled gumshoe on Mars, Alex Lomax.
I'm a member of the Writers Guild of America and the Writers Guild of Canada.
One gets a bit picky after having the success of something like 'FlashForward!'
I think most people are indifferent in their evaluation of what is good or bad.
The great thing about science fiction is that it transcends national boundaries.
A short story is the shortest distance between two points; a novel is the scenic route.
Naturally, one does not normally discuss plans to commit murder with the intended victim.
You have to have confidence in where you're going. Don't live and die by the fans' tweets.
I'm a rationalist. And I can see no evidence for a benevolent and interventionist creator.
A science fiction writer should try to combine the intimately human with the grandly cosmic.
When the state was going to tell you what your future would be, science fiction was irrelevant.
It is either coincidence piled on top of coincidence," said Hollus, "or it is deliberate design.
I really strived to give equal weight to the two halves of my genre's name: science and fiction.
The general public still thinks that science fiction has nothing to do with their day-to-day lives.
We're wired somehow to want to be part of something bigger. And we quest to understand what our role is.
Science fiction has always used metaphors and disguises, talking about alien civilizations or the future.
No one disputes that seeming order can come out of the application of simple rules. But who wrote the rules?
Science fiction's power, if it has any, is that it gives us reasonable extrapolations, not wild and woolly stuff.
The heart and soul of good writing is research; you should write not what you know but what you can find out about.
Science fiction is the WikiLeaks of science, getting word to the public about what cutting-edge research really means.
Science fiction is about things that plausibly might happen. Grounding my work in the real world helps make that clear.
Science fiction is about extrapolation, looking back through history, spotting a trend, and predicting where it will go.
The right things to do are those that keep our violence in abeyance; the wrong things are those that bring it to the fore.
Fiction is all about vicarious experiences and getting into other people's heads in a way that no other art form lets you.
Science fiction should not be dismissed as escapism. It is a profound vehicle for talking about social and political issues.
You fall into a black hole, and you are irretrievably gone from the universe. That finality has made it irresistible to writers.
I frankly couldn't imagine being a series mystery-fiction writer, churning out book after book about the same viewpoint character.
Traditionally, the science fiction reader has been the 16- to 24-year-old male, especially the male with an interest in technology.
Real people are complex, contradictory, and have their own motivations - they can't just be mouthpieces for the writers' point of view.
I'm much more interested in writing about the things that engage and enrage me as an adult rather than in wallowing in childhood sorrows.
In addition to psychopaths, 'Quantum Night' is also a novel about literally thoughtless people, without inner voices, thoughts in their heads.
Paul Levinson has outdone himself: The Plot to Save Socrates is a philosophically rich gem full of big ideas and wonderful time-travel tricks.
An agnostic is someone who believes the nature of the Divine is unknowable... and in that sense, I'm willing to subscribe to being an agnostic.
The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics is the world's greatest pure physics thinktank, and it's located here in Canada, in Waterloo, Ont.
Everything is cross-platform now. That's part of the reality that we live in - a multifaceted, multimedia world - and I'm delighted to be a part of that.
One of the standard story-generating engines for science fiction is to take something we normally think of as metaphoric and treat it as if it were literal.