Quotes from Robert J. Sawyer

Sci-fi is just as much about social science as technology.

I'm a member of the Writers Guild of America and the Writers Guild of Canada.

Science fiction has always used metaphors and disguises, talking about alien civilizations or the future.

The only shows that Americans watch in big numbers are shows about lawyers, doctors, or cops... People don't tune in to watch scientists unless they are forensic scientists.

You have to have confidence in where you're going. Don't live and die by the fans' tweets.

When we have machines that are as intelligent - and then twice as intelligent - as we are, there is no reason why that relationship cannot be synergistic rather than antagonistic.

I'm much more interested in writing about the things that engage and enrage me as an adult rather than in wallowing in childhood sorrows.

A short story is one idea; a novel is a whole soup of them.

A short story is the shortest distance between two points; a novel is the scenic route.

I've long said that if Canada has a role on the world stage, it's principally as a role model, a demonstration that people of all types can get together and live in peace and harmony, which is something we really do most of the time here.

Hard science fiction, which is what I write, often is rightly criticized for having either negligible or unbelievable characterization, but the science I've actually studied most post-secondarily is psychology, and characterization is the art of dramatizing psychological principles.

One of the things that science fiction gets to do is thought experiments about the human condition that would be impractical or unethical to conduct in real life.

The standard model of particle physics says that the universe consists of a very small number of particles, 12, and a very small number of forces, four. If we're correct about those 12 particles and those four forces and understand how they interact, properly, we have the recipe for baking up a universe.

One of the standard story-generating engines for science fiction is to take something we normally think of as metaphoric and treat it as if it were literal.

My personal mission statement is to combine the intimately human and the grandly cosmic. I like to think that science fiction works on these two different scales.

I'm a fiction writer, and fiction is telling the lives of unreal people. But the only way you can learn to do that well is by really understanding the lives of real people.

Once we no longer have the intellectual upper hand, then we quite literally, by definition, cannot outwit our successors. So unless we are absolutely sure that the machines we are building right now are not going to eventually become our new robot overlords, prudence is called for.

What Bradbury had that most other science-fiction writers didn't have at that time was a love for beautiful language, evocative description, and haunting phrases that would stick with the reader.

I'm often characterized as an optimistic writer, and certainly my 'Neanderthal Parallax' and 'WWW' trilogies shade toward the utopian. I like to think that's not simple naivete, but rather a reasonable approach.

Science fiction should not be dismissed as escapism. It is a profound vehicle for talking about social and political issues.

Science fiction has never been about the future; it's always been about the present day whether it's Victorian England that Wells was writing about or the post-9/11 era that I'm writing about.

In the best atheist sense of the word, I feel blessed.

I frankly couldn't imagine being a series mystery-fiction writer, churning out book after book about the same viewpoint character.

It is either coincidence piled on top of coincidence," said Hollus, "or it is deliberate design.