Larry Niven Quotations

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!

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

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

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

In the world of words the imagination is one of the forces of nature.

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.

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

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.

Treat your life like something to be sculpted.

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

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

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 do suspect that privacy was a passing fad.

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

I've got five or six unpublished stories kicking around looking for somebody to buy them.

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

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 not believe they've run out of surprises.

I don't have a strong interest in history.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Half of wisdom is learning what to unlearn.

Jesus Pietro wasn't used to dealing with ghosts. It would require brand new techniques. Grimly he set out to evolve them.

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.

Spray a book with insect spray, drop it in a bag, add some mothballs and seal it. Put it in another bag and seal it. Another. The packages piled up on the floor, each a book sealed in four plastic envelopes.

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.

The Unexpected always comes at the most awkward times.

I love superconductors.

Fear is the brother of hate.

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.

If one must explain a magic trick, one should do so after the show is over.

Never be embarrassed or ashamed by anything you choose to write.

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.

Anything beats an expensive stack of paper.

Consider the true picture. Think of myriads of tiny bubbles, very sparsely scattered, rising through a vast black sea. We rule some of the bubbles. Of the waters we know nothing...

Psi and/or magical powers, if real, are nearly useless.

Hopeless causes are the only ones worth fighting for. The fight for the taxpayer is the most hopeless of them all.

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.

The value of a thing is what that thing will bring. -Legal Maxim

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 gods do not protect fools. Fools are protected by more capable fools.

Mother Nature doesn't care if you're having fun.

How much intelligence does it take to sneak up on a leaf?

That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.

Never tell a computer to forget it.

The perversity of the Universe tends towards a maximum

A civilization has the ethics it can afford

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.

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.

It is a cardinal sin to bore the reader.

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'.

The Product of Freedom and Security is a constant (F X S = k). Giving up freedom for security is beginning to look naive.

The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program. And if we become extinct because we don't have a space program, it'll serve us right!

The majority is always sane.

Sometimes there's no point in giving up.

Stupidity is always a capital crime.

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.

Anything that can go wrong, will

In challenging a kzin, a simple scream of rage is sufficient. You scream and you leap.

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.

The witnessing of titanic events is always dangerous, usually painful, and often fatal.

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

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.

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.

Any damn fool can predict the past.

Never fire a laser at a mirror.

We learn only to ask more questions.

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.

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.

Everything starts as somebody's daydream.

There is no cause so good or noble that it will not attract fuggheads; and the fuggheads will get all the press.

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 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.

Ethics change with technology.

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.