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

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I've got five or six unpublished stories kicking around looking for somebody to buy them.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

Roosevelt's magic lay in one facet of his personality: He knew how to take the risk. No other man in public life I knew could so readily take the challenge of the new.

Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. Because it's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

If it came to saving the life of one priest or sacrificing the life of an entire congregation, the church would save the life of the priest. Which is backwards, of course.

Work is the meat of life, pleasure the dessert.

All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.

At the end, the realization is that she had to get to a place in her life where she could drop her guard and make peace with the fact that whether she had a small amount of time, that she had to kind of live it completely through, instead of living by the rules.

You have choices to make about what you do with the rest of your life.

From the standpoint of observation, then, we must regard it as a highly probable hypothesis that the beginnings of the mental life date from as far back as the beginnings of life at large.

I want to have babies one day but not right now. When I do it I want to do it really well. I want it to be my best project in life.

Any judge who allows an adulterer with a live-in girlfriend to terminate the life of his wife should be impeached.

I can assure you, public service is a stimulating, proud and lively enterprise. It is not just a way of life, it is a way to live fully.

The work which is manipulated looks a little boring to me. I think life is pretty strange anyway. It is wooo, wooo, wooo!

With an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things.

This isn't life in the fast lane, it's life in the oncoming traffic.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.