Larry Niven's Quotes

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.

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

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

Treat your life like something to be sculpted.

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

Anything beats an expensive stack of paper.

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

Everything starts as somebody's daydream.

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

I do suspect that privacy was a passing fad.

I don't have a strong interest in history.

I love superconductors.

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

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

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

I've got five or six unpublished stories kicking around looking for somebody to buy them.

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

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

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

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

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

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.