Larry Niven Quotes

I don`t run ahead of science. I follow as close as I can, and I peer over their shoulders while the scientists are watching their feet.

I`ve got five or six unpublished stories kicking around looking for somebody to buy them.

Everything starts as somebody`s daydream.

I`d like to see superconductors get cheaper and closer to ambient temperature. There are engineering games you could play with that.

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.

In general, I don`t know when inspiration will pop up.

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

Look at the rest of my novels, and every one of them covers a few months or a year, and the crisis is over by the time that`s done.

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.

We`re looking as far ahead as we can, and we don`t get penalized for mistakes.

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

I love superconductors.

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

Anything beats an expensive stack of paper.

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

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!

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

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 do suspect that privacy was a passing fad.

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

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

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

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

Treat your life like something to be sculpted.

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 don`t have a strong interest in history.

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.

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