Quotes from Robert J. Sawyer

The traditional route to success in science fiction is by making a name for yourself in short fiction, so people who read science fiction magazines will recognize your byline on a novel.

In addition to psychopaths, 'Quantum Night' is also a novel about literally thoughtless people, without inner voices, thoughts in their heads.

Psychopathy might lurk behind the mask of sanity.

Regrettably, with '2001' having a title that had a year in it, science fiction essentially set itself up in the public's imagination as saying, 'Here's what you get if you wait to that year.' Well, we all waited till that year, and we didn't get anything at all like that.

Our job is not to predict the future. Rather, it's to suggest all the possible futures - so that society can make informed decisions about where we want to go.

One gets a bit picky after having the success of something like 'FlashForward!'

Honor does not have to be defended.

You can't choose the ways in which you'll be tested.

Learning to ignore things is one of the great paths to inner peace.

How do you define God? Like this. A God I could understand, at least potentially, was infinitely more interesting and relevant than one that defied comprehension.

The right things to do are those that keep our violence in abeyance; the wrong things are those that bring it to the fore.

We absolutely do some of the best science in the world in Canada, across a broad spectrum of disciplines: quantum computing in Waterloo, paleontology in Alberta, neuroscience at the Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health in Vancouver, and many more.

I'm a very skeptical guy: my willing suspension of disbelief doesn't go very far when I'm reading other people's SF, and it goes even less far when I'm writing my own.

All the things that made us basically nasty, rapacious, competitive as a species are not necessarily hard-coded into whatever passes for the DNA of artificial intelligence.

By serializing two novels in 'Analog,' the world's No. 1, best-selling science fiction magazine, I've had 200,000 words of fiction and three cover stories in that magazine. Quite an enviable record.

I'm a rationalist. And I can see no evidence for a benevolent and interventionist creator.

When you're changing centuries, people get curious about the future.

I think there's always been, to some degree, a misunderstanding about what science fiction is all about, in that it has been judged by the general public as being literature of prediction, and it isn't.

A science fiction writer should try to combine the intimately human with the grandly cosmic.

Whether it's created in a lab, written by a programmer, or lands on the White House lawn as a visitor from the stars, if it acts like a human being, it is a human being.

George Orwell's science-fiction classic 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' wasn't a failure because the future it predicted failed to come to pass. Rather, it was a resounding success because it helped us prevent that future.

Print science fiction writers often do consulting for government bodies.

Traditionally, the science fiction reader has been the 16- to 24-year-old male, especially the male with an interest in technology.

General principles should not be based on exceptional cases.