Top 78 Quotes & Sayings by Larry Niven
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American writer Larry Niven.
Last updated on November 25, 2024.
I do not believe they've run out of surprises.
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.
The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program.
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!
And every friend I've got has been writing Mars stories. It was pretty clear I'd never catch up.
I'd repair our education system or replace it with something that works.
I do suspect that privacy was a passing fad.
The human species really could have faced global thermonuclear war. During seventy years of Cold War we grew used to it.
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.
But... watching Steven Barnes taught me to treat my life like an art form.
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.
My problem with new writers is that it takes me five or six years to memorise the right names.
I don't have a strong interest in history.
I never got good at predicting what millions of people will suddenly decide is rational.
I'm not predicting; I just love playing with superconductors.
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.
Building one space station for everyone was and is insane: we should have built a dozen.
In hindsight it may even seem inevitable that a socialist society will starve when it runs out of capitalists.
I've spent a lot of my life among people brighter than myself.
We're looking as far ahead as we can, and we don't get penalized for mistakes.
Treat your life like something to be sculpted.
Everything starts as somebody's daydream.
We should not have assumed that a political space station could be built.
In general, I don't know when inspiration will pop up.
I love superconductors.
I've got five or six unpublished stories kicking around looking for somebody to buy them.
Psi and/or magical powers, if real, are nearly useless.
One mark of a good officer, he remembered, was the ability to make quick decisions. If they happen to be right, so much the better.
There is a technical, literary term for those who mistake the opinions and beliefs of characters in a novel for those of the author. The term is 'idiot'.
You learn by writing short stories. Keep writing short stories. The money's in novels, but writing short stories keeps your writing lean and pointed.
A civilization has the ethics it can afford
The perversity of the Universe tends towards a maximum.
Half of wisdom is learning what to unlearn.
Boredom is my worst enemy. It's killed a lot of my friends, but it won't get me. When I get bored, I go risk my life somewhere.
Once every hundred years, the Los Angeles smog rolls away for a single night, leaving the air as clean as interstellar space. That way the gods can see if Los Angeles is still there. If it is, they roll the smog back so they won't have to look at it.
The Unexpected always comes at the most awkward times.
Species evolve to meet the environment. An intelligent species changes the environment to suit itself. As soon as a species becomes intelligent, it should stop evolving.
Ethics change with technology.
The Gods do not protect fools. Fools are protected by more capable fools.
The reader has certain rights. He bought your story. Think of this as an implicit contract. He's entitled to be entertained, instructed, amused; maybe all three. If he quits in the middle, or puts the book down feeling his time has been wasted, you're in violation.
Never be embarrassed or ashamed by anything you choose to write.
We learn only to ask more questions.
Love was a delicious blend of warm and cold. There was comfort in making love. It solved no problems: but one could run away from problems.
How much intelligence does it take to sneak up on a leaf?
Never fire a laser at a mirror.
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
Fear is the brother of hate.
There were timelines branching and branching, a mega-universe of universes, millions more every minute. Billions? Trillions? The universe split every time someone made a decision. Split, so that every decision ever made could go both ways. Every choice made by every man, woman, and child was reversed in the universe next door.
In the world of words the imagination is one of the forces of nature.
Sometimes there's no point in giving up.
The best advice I was ever given was on my twenty-first birthday when my father said, Son, here's a million dollars. Don't lose it.
There is no cause so good or noble that it will not attract fuggheads; and the fuggheads will get all the press.
There had been a popular joke on Freedom, started by a man named Calder. Looking down from space, he had said, the dominant life forms on Earth were obviously the cereals and other grasses. They occupied all the most desirable and fertile land; and they had tamed insects and animals to care for them. In particular, they had domesticated the bipeds to nurture and cultivate them and to save and plant their seed. Now, watching the farmers, Alex could easily imagine that they were worshiping and genuflecting before their masters.
For each human being there is an optimum ratio between change and stasis. Too little change, he grows bored. Too little stability, he panics and loses his ability to adapt. One who marries six times in ten years won't change jobs. One who moves often to serve his company will maintain a stable marriage. A woman chained to one home and family may redecorate frantically or take a lover or go to many costume parties.
Any damn fool can predict the past.
It's very difficult for a black man to get out of South-Central Los Angeles, and get out civilized....The only men I know who have escaped, all began reading Robert Heinlein at age ten.
The brightest minds in our field have been trying to find a definition of science fiction for these past seventy years. The short answer is, science fiction stories are given as possible, not necessarily here and now, but somewhere, sometime.
Intelligence is just a tool to be used toward a goal, and goals are not always chosen intelligently.
Anything you don't understand is dangerous until you do understand it.
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