Larry Niven Quotes

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.

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.

Treat your life like something to be sculpted.

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

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.

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

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

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

I’ve got five or six unpublished stories kicking around looking for somebody to buy them.

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

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

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

I love superconductors.

I don’t have a strong interest in history.