Larry Niven Quotes
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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.
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Hopeless causes are the only ones worth fighting for. The fight for the taxpayer is the most hopeless of them all.
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I am trying to prevent a bloodbath. Is that clear enough for you? I'm trying to prevent a civil war that could kill half the people in this world.
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We should not have assumed that a political space station could be built.
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Building one space station for everyone was and is insane: we should have built a dozen.
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The Gods do not protect fools. Fools are protected by more capable fools.
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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.
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I don't have a strong interest in history.
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And every friend I've got has been writing Mars stories. It was pretty clear I'd never catch up.
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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.
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I do suspect that privacy was a passing fad.
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Ethics change with technology.
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We're looking as far ahead as we can, and we don't get penalized for mistakes.
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I have a kind of psychic invisibility. As long as I can stay scared, I can keep people from seeing me. That's what we have to count on.
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Anything beats an expensive stack of paper.
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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.
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Anything you don't understand is dangerous until you do understand it.
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Intelligence is just a tool to be used toward a goal, and goals are not always chosen intelligently.
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Any damn fool can predict the past.
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Sometimes there's no point in giving up.
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It is a cardinal sin to bore the reader.
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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.
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Jesus Pietro wasn't used to dealing with ghosts. It would require brand new techniques. Grimly he set out to evolve them.
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Never be embarrassed or ashamed by anything you choose to write.
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Everything starts as somebody's daydream.
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Psi and/or magical powers, if real, are nearly useless.
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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.
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A civilization has the ethics it can afford
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In general, I don't know when inspiration will pop up.
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In hindsight it may even seem inevitable that a socialist society will starve when it runs out of capitalists.
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