Quotes from Michael Crichton

Most areas of intellectual life have discovered the virtues of speculation, and have embraced them wildly. In academia, speculation is usually dignified as theory.

Life will find a way.

They are focused on whether they can do something. They never think whether they should do something.

When I get sick, I go to my doctor like everyone else. A doctor has powerful tools that may help me. Or those tools may hurt me, make me worse. I have to decide. It's my life. It's my responsibility.

Even if you don't believe in God, you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious.

In the information society, nobody thinks. We expect to banish paper, but we actually banish thought.

Morality must keep up with technology because if a person is faced with the choice of being moral and dead or immoral and alive, they'll choose life everytime.

Writing a book is a bit like going on location for a movie. You're absent from your life, your family, and your friends. You're psychologically gone, so you might as well be physically gone.

Reality is always greater - much greater - than what we know, than whatever we can say about it.

Instead of writing thrillers to pay for my train bills, I was actually now going to medical school in order to have something to write about.

The planet has survived everything, in its time. It will certainly survive us.

There is always a cause for fear. The cause may change over time, but the fear is always with us.

There is an idea of, you know, informing people about some emerging things. And part of that is just a reflection of my own interest, following different areas and saying, you know, look what they're doing now.

I am certain there is too much certainty in the world.

Books aren't written - they're rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it.

Because the history of evolution is that life escapes all barriers. Life breaks free. Life expands to new territories. Painfully, perhaps even dangerously. But life finds a way.

We think we know what we are doing. We have always thought so.

Anyone who says he knows God's intention is showing a lot of very human ego.

They don't have intelligence. They have what I call 'thintelligence.' They see the immediate situation. They think narrowly and they call it 'being focused.' They don't see the surround. They don't see the consequences.

Praise not the day until evening has come, a woman until she is burnt, a sword until it is tried, a maiden until she is married, ice until it has been crossed, beer until it has been drunk.

They didn't understand what they were doing. I'm afraid that will be on the tombstone of the human race.

It's hard to decide who's truly brilliant; it's easier to see who's driven, which in the long run may be more important.

Everyone has a hidden agenda. Except me!

Nobody smart knows what they want to do until they get into their twenties or thirties.