24 Quotes by Larry Niven
- 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.
- 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.
- We're looking as far ahead as we can, and we don't get penalized for mistakes.
- I'm not predicting; I just love playing with superconductors.
- I've got five or six unpublished stories kicking around looking for somebody to buy them.
- In general, I don't know when inspiration will pop up.
- We should not have assumed that a political space station could be built.
- 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 repair our education system or replace it with something that works.
- My problem with new writers is that it takes me five or six years to memorise the right names.
- In hindsight it may even seem inevitable that a socialist society will starve when it runs out of capitalists.
- 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.
- The human species really could have faced global thermonuclear war. During seventy years of Cold War we grew used to it.
- I never got good at predicting what millions of people will suddenly decide is rational.
- Anything beats an expensive stack of paper.
- 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!
- Building one space station for everyone was and is insane: we should have built a dozen.
- Everything starts as somebody's daydream.
- I do not believe they've run out of surprises.
- I do suspect that privacy was a passing fad.
- I don't have a strong interest in history.
- I love superconductors.
- And every friend I've got has been writing Mars stories. It was pretty clear I'd never catch up.
- Ego is the anesthesia that deadens the pain of stupidity.
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