Quotes by Science Fiction Writers

I do what I can,' I said. 'When I can do more, I will. You know that.

People do blame you for the things they do to you.

There is an abandonment, an escape, that physical labor bestows.

Looking around me, I saw that all my colleagues were busy at the same task. Eyes were rolled up, mouths hung open, here and there a finger twitched. It had to be either a day trip from the Catatonic Academy, or the modern press at work.

John Varley

And if I were to open you up - would you see anything less remarkable? Less intricately dazzling, in its squelching, spongy way? Lungs and heart and spleen, and all the rest - ticking away, as it were? Yet you walk down the boulevard, and pass any number of such wonderful devices, all ticking away as they walk, and think it no great marvel.

K.W. Jeter

All men, reaching back to Adam in the Garden, plead Ignorance as their defence; when, if we were but honest, we would admit that the apple was hedged with every warning imaginable. So I too fell; perhaps all sins are not causes but effects, being the result of that first sin, Boredom.

K.W. Jeter

The longer I observe the way people really act, the happier I am that I never pay attention to them.

George Alec Effinger

We collected all the bones we could find, and yesterday, Natividad wrapped them in a shawl that she had knitted years ago. It was the most beautiful thing she owned."A thing like that should serve the living," Bankole said when she offered it."You are living," Natividad said. "I like you. I wish I could have met your sister.

Octavia E. Butler

Anybody who has had a great treasure has always led a precarious existence.

John Wyndham

Mathematics has always shown a curious ability to be applicable to nature, and this may express a deep link between our minds and nature. We are the Universe speaking out, a part of nature. So it is not so surprising that our systems of logic and mathematics sing in tune with nature.

George Zebrowski

Take a drink because you pity yourself, and then the drink pities you and has a drink, and then two good drinks get together and that calls for drinks all around.

H. Beam Piper

[O]ld enough to be wise yet young enough to be willing to partake in an arduous crusade.

Donald Kingsbury

Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. It is a means of combining the intelligence of many to achieve ongoing group adaptation. Civilization, like intelligence, may serve well, serve adequately, or fail to serve its adaptive function. When civilization fails to serve, it must disintegrate unless it is acted upon by unifying internal or external forces.

Octavia E. Butler

Already, in the last few decades, you have realized the utter futility of of encumbering yourselves with superfluous possessions that have no useful virtue, but which, for various sentimental reasons, you continue to hoard, thus lessening your life's efficiency by using for it time and attention that should have been applied to the practical work of life's accomplishments. (The Miracle of the Lily - 1928)

Clare Winger Harris

Adventures, I reflected, are all very fine but a certain amount of civilised comfort forms the true kernel of our desires.

K.W. Jeter

Contradictions do not perplex the logician. They arise because there are more rules to an open game than can be known.

Donald Kingsbury

I wasn't trying to work out my own ancestry. I was trying to get people to feel slavery. I was trying to get across the kind of emotional and psychological stones that slavery threw at people.

Octavia E. Butler

Then, somehow, I got caught up in one of Kevin's World War II books - a book of excerpts from the recollections of concentration camp survivors. Stories of beatings, starvation, filth, disease, torture, every possible degradation. As though the Germans had been trying to do in only a few years what the Americans had worked at for nearly two hundred. ... Like the Nazis, antebellum whites had known quite a bit about torture - quite a bit more than I ever wanted to learn.

Octavia E. Butler

This is the biggest lot of abolitionist trash I ever saw.”“No it isn’t,” I said. “That book wasn’t even written until a century after slavery was abolished.”“Then why the hell are they still complaining about it?

Octavia E. Butler

…after all, what is a planet but an island in space?

John Wyndham

The mist enveloped her form. She was lifted into it, then instantly dropped. Swiftly, the mist retreated to the window.It was gone. The old woman lay flat on her back, eyes open and staring; her mouth open, too, unprettily.That was the over-all effect - the utter lack of anything beautiful.("The Witch")

A.E. van Vogt

The two women looked at me as if I were the Messiah returning with their personal salvations sealed in separate envelopes.

George Alec Effinger

I have a huge and savage conscience that won't let me get away with things.

Octavia E. Butler

There is a certain concentrated, avid-for-blood look that appears on the faces of reporters on the trail of a very big story that you'd have to visit the big cat house at the zoo to see duplicated in its primal state. From the look on Brenda's face, if a tiger was standing between her and this story right now, the cat would soon have a tall-journalist-sized hole in him.

John Varley

Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution and you get the problem back. Sometimes the problem has mutated or disappeared. Often it is still there as strong as it ever was.

Donald Kingsbury

Time makes fools of us all. Our only comfort is that greater shall come after us.

Eric Temple Bell

“Your Tim is so unmistakably a healthy extravert type. Mens stulta in corpore sano, and all that.”“Exactly,” she agreed.

John Wyndham

Great,' I said. 'Visit exotic Australia. Get bitten by an exotic snake. Die exotically.

Steven Gould

Contentedly sat the old woman. Soon now, the sea would hold no terrors, and the blinds wouldn't have to be down, nor the windows shut; she would even be able to walk along the shore at midnight as of old; and they, whom she had deserted so long ago, would once more shrink from the irresistable energy aura of her new, young body.The sound of the sea came to her, where she sat so quietly; calm sound at first, almost gentle in the soft sibilation of each wave thrust. Farther out, the voices of the water were louder, more raucous, blatantly confident, but the meaning of what they said was blurred by the distance, a dim, clamorous confusion that rustled discordantly out of the gathering night.Night!She shouldn't be aware of night falling, when the blinds were drawn.("The Witch")

A.E. van Vogt

He had the beginning of wrinkles and the easy manner of one who has already made his mistakes.

Donald Kingsbury

If I believe the same things today I did yesterday I've learned nothing.

A.E. van Vogt

Tut, tut. We can't let mere sentiment intrude. This is Science.

K.W. Jeter

I had a lot of other ideas, now and then, but every time I took a second look at one, it got sick and died.

H. Beam Piper

What we do with the product of genius is first of all ram it down to the lowest common denominator and then multiply it by the vulgarest possible fraction. -from "Pawley's Peepholes

John Wyndham

A man who never makes mistakes has long since ceased to do anything new. A man who is always making mistakes is a doomed man with swollen ambitions. But he who judiciously salts success with mistake is the rapid learner.

Donald Kingsbury

A woman stood in front of her with the peculiar poise that comes before the discovery of age and after the loss of innocence.

Donald Kingsbury

Before he could lose courage he flung himself back and slammed his sleep-inducer to full theta.

James Tiptree Jr.

It's better to teach people than to scare them, Lauren. If you scare them and nothing happens, they lose their fear, and you lose some of your authority with them. It's harder to scare them a second time, harder to teach them, harder to win back their trust. Best to begin by teaching.

Octavia E. Butler

One cannot take a coward on dangerous missions or trust one’s fortune to a fool. How then are cowards and fools to be employed?

Donald Kingsbury

Jesus, what a nuisance it was, being desperate to stay alive.

George Alec Effinger

The way I came to miss the end of the world – well, the end of the world I had known for close on thirty years – was sheer accident: like a lot of survival, when you come to think of it.

John Wyndham

All attempts at law, all religion, all ethical norms might be nothing more than attempts by the weak to restrain the strong. Then, within the law, arise the new strong, who subvert the law for their own ends of power and family interest, leaving the old strong outside their circle to pursue the waiting possibilities which they call crime. The weak, the cowardly, the decent ones, live between these groups.

George Zebrowski

I like it where it gets dark at night, and if you want noise, you have to make it yourself.

H. Beam Piper

The full impact of the Lobachevskian method of challenging axioms has probably yet to be felt. It is no exaggeration to call Lobachevsky the Copernicus of Geometry [as did Clifford], for geometry is only a part of the vaster domain which he renovated; it might even be just to designate him as a Copernicus of all thought.

Eric Temple Bell

for a purpose without reason

Donald Kingsbury

He couldn't think of a good place. At first he thought she hated all living beings equally. Lately he had come to believe he held a special place in her heart, just below rattlesnakes, pederasts, and spirochetes. Definitely a tough place to start from, but determination had always been Conal's strong point.

John Varley

I'm Valerie Rye,' she said, savoring the words. 'It's all right for you to talk to me.

Octavia E. Butler

[H]e was still young enough to think that there was something fundamentally inhuman about thinking more than one step ahead at a time.

Hal Clement

I found that I couldn't muster any belief in a literal heaven or hell, anyway. I thought the best we could all do was to look after one another and clean up the various hells we've made right here on earth.

Octavia E. Butler

It must be, I thought, one of the race's most persistent and comforting hallucinations to trust that "it can't happen here" -- that one's own time and place is beyond cataclysm.

John Wyndham

You are hierarchical. That's the older and more entrenched characteristic. We saw it in your closest animal relatives and in your most distant ones. It's a terrestrial characteristic. When human intelligence served it instead of guiding it, when human intelligence did not even acknowledge it as a problem, but took pride in it or did not notice it at all... That was like ignoring cancer.

Octavia E. Butler

But not she. Her eternity is an article of her faith. Great wars and disasters can ebb and flow, races rise and fall, empires wither with suffering and death, but these are superficialities: she, woman, is perpetual, essential; she will go on for ever.

John Wyndham

I'm a reliable witness, you're a reliable witness, practically all God's children are reliable witnesses in their own estimation--which makes it funny how such different ideas of the same affair get about.

John Wyndham

Listen, no part of me is more definitive of who I am than my brain.

Octavia E. Butler

At the end of the second week they were still working and Arretapec, Conway and their patient were being talked, whistled, cheeped and grunted about in every language in use at the hospital.

James White

Fantasy is totally wide open; all you really have to do is follow the rules you've set. But if you're writing about science, you have to first learn what you're writing about.

Octavia E. Butler

I was attracted to science fiction because it was so wide open. I was able to do anything and there were no walls to hem you in and there was no human condition that you were stopped from examining.

Octavia E. Butler

You can't kill an idea the way they try to. You can keep it down awhile, but sooner or later it'll come out. Now what you've got to understand is that the wheel's not evil. Never mind what the scared men all tell you. no discovery is good or evil until men make it that way." -The Wheel, John Wtndham

John Wyndham

The finest SF comes to grips with life's mysteries, with our resentments against our own natures and our limited societies. It does so by asking basic questions in the artful, liberating way that is unique to this form of writing. Echoes of it are found in other forms of fiction - in the novel of ideas, in the historical novel, in the writings of the great philosophers and scientists; but the best SF does this all more searchingly, by taking what is in most people only a moment of wonder and rebellion against the arbitrariness of existence and making of it an art enriched by knowledge and possibility, expressing our deepest human longing to penetrate into the dark heart of the unknown.

George Zebrowski

Science fiction is a field of writing where, month after month, every printed word implies to hundreds of thousands of people: 'There is change. Look, today's fantastic story is tomorrow's fact.

A.E. van Vogt

1 2 3 Next