Larry Niven Quotes

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.

Ethics change with technology.

Half of wisdom is learning what to unlearn.

The Gods do not protect fools. Fools are protected by more capable fools.

Everything starts as somebody's daydream.

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'.

Anything you don't understand is dangerous until you do understand it.

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

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

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

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

Intelligence is just a tool to be used toward a goal, and goals are not always chosen intelligently.

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

Sometimes there's no point in giving up.

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.

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.

The Unexpected always comes at the most awkward times.

We learn only to ask more questions.

I do suspect that privacy was a passing fad.

Never fire a laser at a mirror.

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.

Fear is the brother of hate.

Any damn fool can predict the past.

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.

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.