You look at the world around you, and you take it apart into all its components. Then you take some of those components, throw them away, and plug in different ones, start it up and see what happens.

Stories where the author has known very little, but run a computer program that tells him how to construct a planet, and looked up specific things about rocketry and so on, really suck.

A large fraction of the most interesting scientists have read a lot of SF at one time or another, either early enough that it may have played a part in their becoming scientists or at some later date just because they liked the ideas.

I'm doing a book, 'Chasing Science,' about the pleasures of science as a spectator sport.

I don't think the scientific method and the science fictional method are really analogous. The thing about them is that neither is really practiced very much, at least not consciously. But the fact that they are methodical does relate them.

You look at the world around you, and you take it apart into all its components. Then you take some of those components, throw them away, and plug in different ones, start it up and see what happens.

That's the method: restructure the world we live in in some way, then see what happens.

If you don't care about science enough to be interested in it on its own, you shouldn't try to write hard science fiction. You can write like Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison as much as you want.

The head of Fermilab was reading Astonishing Stories when he was ten.

The science fiction method is dissection and reconstruction.

I was thinking of writing a little foreword saying that history is, after all, based on people's recollections, which change with time.

I did that for 40 years or more. I never had any writer's block. I got up in the morning, sat down at the typewriter - now, computer - lit up a cigarette.

In terms of stories I would buy for a science fiction magazine, if they take place in the future, that might do it.

The big new development in my life is, when I turned 80, I decided I no longer have to do four pages a day. For me, it's like retiring.

I'm pretty catholic about what constitutes science fiction.

My old English buddy, John Rackham, wrote and told me what made science fiction different from all other kinds of literature - science fiction is written according to the science fiction method.

It's clear that science and science fiction have overlapping populations.

My first thought was always a cigarette. It still is, but I haven't cheated.

A lot of the cosmologists and astrophysicists clearly had been reading science fiction.

People ask me how I do research for my science fiction. The answer is, I never do any research.

Stephen Hawking said he spent most of his first couple of years at Cambridge reading science fiction (and I believe that, because his grades weren't all that great).

Johnny Winter is one of the best blues players in the world. He's very underrated.

The world is... the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not inhabit only the inner man, or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.

You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand.

Well concerning the world records that I did, I think it helps a lot to me, yeah. I think it's a very individual thing because I heard some people say, like, oh I don't like it at all. But I definitely, for me it really made a big difference.

Christians should never fail to sense the operation of an angelic glory. It forever eclipses the world of demonic powers, as the sun does a candle's light.

I do believe there are leaders who are like lightning and they come along and they lead. The Lincolns of the world, the Alexander the Greats, they do exist. They have existed.

The people of England are the most enthusiastic in the world.

You've got to realize. In the western world, regardless of what color you are, what title the music is, it's all played by the same notes.

Most fathers don't see the war within the daughter, her struggles with conflicting images of the idealized and flawed father, her temptation both to retreat to Daddy's lap and protection and to push out of his embrace to that of beau and the world beyond home.

Scientific corporations might well become almost independent states and be enabled to undertake their largest experiments without consulting the outside world - a world which would be less and less able to judge what the experiments were about.

To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower Hold infinity in the palms of your hand and eternity in an hour.

The painter... does not fit the paints to the world. He most certainly does not fit the world to himself. He fits himself to the paint. The self is the servant who bears the paintbox and its inherited contents.

The world has fundamentally changed. It fundamentally changed when the Berlin Wall came down and the 'evil empire' ceased to exist. We are engaged around the world whether we like it or not.

I think having eight kids evens things out a bit. You learn about the world; you learn about the world; you learn you've got to get along. We're all - if anything - very adjustable.

The bravest sight in the world is to see a great man struggling against adversity.

It's about how to bring together the seemingly contradictory aspects of the memorial, which is about a tragedy and how it changed the world, but also about creating a vital and beautiful city of the 21st century.

The world remains ever the same.

Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college.

A true critic ought to dwell upon excellencies rather than imperfections, to discover the concealed beauties of a writer, and communicate to the world such things as are worth their observation.

I still feel that a movie has to attempt to say something - even if it fails miserably. But I've sort of given up on believing that I'm going to change the world with every film I choose to act in.

In their greatest hour of need, the world failed the people of Rwanda.

90 percent of my time is spent on 10 percent of the world.

I was stuck at home in bed with me and got more and more involved with the Internet. I used it to keep in contact with friends and to make sure I was up to date with everything that was going on in the world.

There is one thing higher than Royalty: and that is religion, which causes us to leave the world, and seek God.

When I was starting to get noticed as an actor in the 1970s for something other than the third cowboy on the right who ended up dying in every movie or episode, Burt Reynolds was the biggest star in the world.

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.

Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.

Learn about the world, the way it works, any kind of science and anthropology, it's really an interesting place we live in. Evolution is a really fantastic idea, even more than the idea of God I think.