Quotes from Isaac Asimov

And [Asimov]'ll sign anything, hardbacks, softbacks, other people's books, scraps of paper. Inevitably someone handed him a blank check on the occasion when I was there, and he signed that without as much as a waver to his smile — except that he signed: 'Harlan Ellison.

When asked for advice by beginners. Know your ending, I say, or the river of your story may finally sink into the desert sands and never reach the sea.

Old men tend to forget what thought was like in their youth; they forget the quickness of the mental jump, the daring of the youthful intuition, the agility of the fresh insight. They become accustomed to the more plodding varieties of reason, and because this is more than made up by the accumulation of experience, old men think themselves wiser than the young.

People who don't expect justice don't have to suffer disappointment.

The laws of history are as absolute as the laws of physics, and if the probabilities of error are greater, it is only because history does not deal with as many humans as physics does atoms, so that individual variations count for more.

I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.

The final end of Eternity, and the beginning of Infinity

Of course there are worlds. Millions of them! Every star you see has worlds, and most of those you don't see.

In a properly automated and educated world, then, machines may prove to be the true humanizing influence. It may be that machines will do the work that makes life possible and that human beings will do all the other things that make life pleasant and worthwhile

Above all, never think you're not good enough. Never think that. In life people will take you at your own reckoning.

Weak emperors mean strong viceroys.

Even as a youngster, though, I could not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presented danger, the solution was ignorance.

There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere.

Intuition is the art, peculiar to the human mind, of working out the correct answer from data that is, in itself, incomplete or even, perhaps, misleading.

you just can't differentiate between a robot and the very best of humans.

Past glories are poor feeding.

Postulates are based on assumption and adhered to by faith. Nothing in the Universe can shake them.

The soft bonds of love are indifferent to life and death. They hold through time so that yesterday's love is part of today's and the confidence in tomorrow's love is also part of today's. And when one dies, the memory lives in the other, and is warm and breathing. And when both die — I almost believe, rationalist though I am — that somewhere it remains, indestructible and eternal, enriching all of the universe by the mere fact that once it existed.

It seems to me, Golan, that the advance of civilization is nothing but an exercise in the limiting of privacy.

Nothing has to be true, but everything has to sound true.

Writing is a lonely job. Even if a writer socializes regularly, when he gets down to the real business of his life, it is he and his type writer or word processor. No one else is or can be involved in the matter.

Having reached 451 books as of now doesn't help the situation. If I were to be dying now, I would be murmuring, Too bad! Only four hundred fifty-one. (Those would be my next-to-last words. The last ones will be: I love you, Janet.) [They were. -Janet.]

It was obvious that bigotry was never a one-way operation, that hatred bred hatred!

All normal life, Peter, consciously or otherwise, resent domination. If the domination is by an inferior, or by a supposed inferior, the resentment becomes stronger.