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.

I don't have a strong interest in history.

Building one space station for everyone was and is insane: we should have built a dozen.

I'd repair our education system or replace it with something that works.

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.

I'm not predicting; I just love playing with superconductors.

In hindsight it may even seem inevitable that a socialist society will starve when it runs out of capitalists.

Everything starts as somebody's daydream.

In general, I don't know when inspiration will pop up.

I do suspect that privacy was a passing fad.

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.

We're looking as far ahead as we can, and we don't get penalized for mistakes.

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've spent a lot of my life among people brighter than myself.

The human species really could have faced global thermonuclear war. During seventy years of Cold War we grew used to it.

I love superconductors.

Anything beats an expensive stack of paper.

I do not believe they've run out of surprises.

Treat your life like something to be sculpted.

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!

My problem with new writers is that it takes me five or six years to memorise the right names.

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.

And every friend I've got has been writing Mars stories. It was pretty clear I'd never catch up.

But... watching Steven Barnes taught me to treat my life like an art form.

I've got five or six unpublished stories kicking around looking for somebody to buy them.

We should not have assumed that a political space station could be built.

I never got good at predicting what millions of people will suddenly decide is rational.

The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program.

In a collaboration each author will do 75 of the work.

Everything starts as somebodys daydream

Everything starts as somebodys daydream.

The dinosaurs became extinct because they didnt have a space program.

Slippery smooth rhythmic motion absolute single minded purpose motion for the pleasure of motion itself. It was terrible it its beauty the flight of the horse.

A sister is a little bit of childhood that can never be lost.

A lot of people have gotten into comedy because of certain influences in their lives or events that were painful, and I really have wracked my brain to figure it out. I pretty much have had a normal childhood. Maybe it was too normal.

It sounds ideal, a sort of beach childhood. But it wasn't really. I didn't use the beach very much at all.

All our pursuits, from childhood to manhood, are only trifles of different sorts and sizes, proportioned to our years and views.

The secret of the truly successful, I believe, is that they learned very early in life how not to be busy. They saw through that adage, repeated to me so often in childhood, that anything worth doing is worth doing well.

I don't carry any early childhood trauma around with me, if that's what you're hinting at. The story of the bicycles - and there were three of them which were stolen from me - I've dealt with it well.

Remember Graham Green's dictum that childhood is the bank balance of the writer? I think that all writers feel alienated. Most of us go back to an alienated childhood in some way or another. I know that I do.

Hors d'oeuvres have always a pathetic interest for me; they remind me of one's childhood that one goes through wondering what the next course is going to be like - and during the rest of the menu one wishes one had eaten more of the hors d'oeuvres.

Arguably, no artist grows up: If he sheds the perceptions of childhood, he ceases being an artist.

Everything I write comes from my childhood in one way or another. I am forever drawing on the sense of mystery and wonder and possibility that pervaded that time of my life.

Well I was an asthmatic child. So that for most of my childhood I was in bed. Bedridden.

Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childhood days, recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth, and transport the traveler back to his own fireside and quiet home!

I think actors always retain one foot in the cradle. We're switched on to our youth, to our childhood. We have to be because we're in the business of transferring emotions to other people.

If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.

I had a kind of Dickensian childhood.

Friendships in childhood are usually a matter of chance, whereas in adolescence they are most often a matter of choice.