Quotes from Larry Niven

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

I do suspect that privacy was a passing fad.

How much intelligence does it take to sneak up on a leaf?

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

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.

Music had played suddenly through the cabin, complex and lovely, rich in minor tones, like the sad call of a sex-maddened computer. Nessus whistled.

On a world built to ordered specification, there was no logical reason for such a mountain to exist. Yet every world should have at least one unclimbable mountain.

Psi and/or magical powers, if real, are nearly useless.

Dune; Nova; Double Star; The Corridors of Time; Cat's Cradle; Half Past Human; Murder in Retrospect; Gideon's Day; The Red Right Hand; The Trojan Hearse; A Deadly Shade of Gold; Conjure Wife; Rosemary's Baby; Silverlock; King Conan. He'd packed books not to entertain, nor even to illustrate philosophies of life, but to rebuild civilization.

They used to teach us that evolution of intelligent beings wasn't possible, she said. Societies protect their weaker members. Civilizations tend to make wheel chairs and spectacles and hearing aids as soon as they have the tools for them. When a society makes war, the men generally have to pass a fitness test before they're allowed, to risk their lives. I suppose it helps win the war. She smiled. But it leaves precious little room for the survival of the fittest.

Everything starts as somebody's dream.

We're in the hands of infinite power and infinite sadism.

Louis suggested that the ship be called 'Lying Bastard'. For their own reasons, Teela and Speaker agreed. For his own reason, Nessus did not object.

Some amiably deranged science-fiction writer had come up with it forty years back and, like so many of his kind, given it away for free - or anyway at fifty cents a word.

We play your part in order to understand you, but you each seem to play a thousand parts. It makes things difficult for an honest, hard-working bug-eyed monster.

Spray a book with insect spray, drop it in a bag, add some mothballs and seal it. Put it in another bag and seal it. Another. The packages piled up on the floor, each a book sealed in four plastic envelopes.

This place is a playground for a questing mind.

The luck of Teela Brown.

sometimes the only way to call attention to bad construction was to set fire to the building.