Quotes from Robert J. Sawyer

He had a collection of science-fiction films on DVD and Blu-ray discs, and although he said he'd seen most of them before, Caitlin was surprised to discover how many of the cases were still shrink-wrapped. "Why'd you buy them if you weren't going to watch them?" she asked. He looked at the tall, thin cabinets that contained the movies and seemed to ponder the question. "My childhood was on sale," he said at last, "so I bought it.

That natural selection can produce changes within a type is disputed by no one, not even the staunchest creationist. But that it can transform one species into another — that, in fact, has never been observed.

As laser-bright moments; diamond-hard memories; crisp and clear. A future lived, a future savored, a future of moments so sharp and pointed that they would sometimes cut and sometimes glint so brightly it would hurt to contemplate them, but sometimes, too, would be joyous, an absolute, pure, unalloyed joy, the kind of joy he hadn't felt much if at all lo these twenty-one years.

Donald Trump was building a pyramid in the Nevada desert to house his eventual remains. When done, it will be ten meters taller than the Great Pyramid at Giza.

Free will is not always the most important thing

I get tired of hearing some science-fiction fans saying that characterization isn't important in SF. In point of fact, I think it's probably more important in SF than in mainstream fiction. After all, if the author can't characterize humans well, he or she probably can't characterize aliens well either.

And Wolfram knows about cellular automata?" "Oh, my goodness, yes," said Anna. "He wrote a book you could kill a man with—twelve hundred pages—called A New Kind of Science. It's all about them." "We should totally ask him what he thinks!" Caitlin said.

Mr. Lockery—my biology teacher—says if dinosaurs were magically brought forward in time today, we'd have nothing to worry about. Dogs, wolves, and bears would make short work of tyrannosaurs." She nodded at Schrödinger, who was now padding across the floor in the opposite direction. "Big cats, too. They're faster, tougher, and brighter than anything that existed seventy million years ago. Everything is always ramping up, always escalating.

There is no debt between people who are in love; there is only total forgiveness, and going forward.

To use the human metaphor, it would be like trying to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. It can't be done.

retire-or-expire

Gone. and it was completely. Everyone I'd every known, every place I'd ever been. My Mother. My father. Rebecca. Out of site. Out of mind.

You know the difference between a psychopath and a homeopath?" She shook her head. "Some psychopaths do no harm.

That is fine. Feeling a need to convince others that you are right also is something that comes from religion, I think; I am simply content to know that I am right, even if others do not know it.

It is the difference: we generalize do not. Specific bad humans did specific bad things; those humans do we not like. But the rest of humanity we judge one by one.

We've known since 2007 that there's superposition in chlorophyll, for instance. Photosynthesis has a ninety-five percent energy-transfer efficiency rate, which is better than anything we can engineer. Plants achieve that by using superposition to simultaneously try all the possible pathways between their light-collecting molecules and their reaction-center proteins so that energy is always sent down the most efficient route; it's a form of biological quantum computing.

Bradbury was the one guy who was published in places like the 'Saturday Evening Post.' He was the guy who brought science fiction to the masses. If he hadn't existed, science fiction would have been a well-kept secret in literature instead of a widely consumed phenomenon.

Science fiction's power, if it has any, is that it gives us reasonable extrapolations, not wild and woolly stuff.

When I started publishing - my first novel came out in 1990 - there were no options for publishing science fiction in Canada. There were no small presses, and the large presses simply would not touch it at all.

An agnostic is someone who believes the nature of the Divine is unknowable... and in that sense, I'm willing to subscribe to being an agnostic.

Science fiction is about things that plausibly might happen. Grounding my work in the real world helps make that clear.

The general public still thinks that science fiction has nothing to do with their day-to-day lives.

We're wired somehow to want to be part of something bigger. And we quest to understand what our role is.

There were four major 20th-century science fiction writers: Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein and Ray Bradbury. Of those four, the first three were all published principally in science-fiction magazines. They were preaching to the converted.