Quotes About Exploration

You believe that the kind of story you want to tell might be best received by the science fiction and fantasy audience. I hope you're right, because in many ways this is the best audience in the world to write for. They're open-minded and intelligent. They want to think as well as feel, understand as well as dream. Above all, they want to be led into places that no one has ever visited before. It's a privilege to tell stories to these readers, and an honour when they applaud the tale you tell.

we have some good ideas here. But the only way to know if they're workable is to try to make them fail. If we fail to fail, then maybe we're on the right track.

he would have been lost except he started out lost and when you start out completely lost, it's hard to get loster.

Never take another human being to the third life, because we don't know how to go.

Rigorous extrapolation, a gosh-wow love of gadgets, and mystical adventures in strange and mysterious places; every major stream in speculative fiction today can be traced back to authors who were writing before the publishing categories existed. From among the readers in the twenties and thirties who loved any or all of these authors arose the first generation of science fiction writers, who knew themselves to be continuing in a trail that had been blazed by giants.

As he thought of it, though, he could not imagine what just living might actually be. He had never done it in his life. But he wanted to do it anyway.

Who but the adolescent is free to have the adventures that most of us are looking for when we turn to storytellers to satisfy our hunger?

By deciding that they would study only that which could be verified under controlled conditions, they had merely limited their field of endeavor. Most truth lay outside the neat confines of science....

I firmly believe that a good storyteller's education never ends, because to tell stories perfectly you have to know everything about everything. Naturally, none of us actually achieve such complete knowledge - but we should live as if we were trying to do so. You can't afford to close off any area of inquiry.

Until you have examined and comprehended the world around you, you can't possibly create a complex and believable imaginary world.

A pure soul must never grow attached to any one thing. A pure soul must expose himself to new things every day.

I want to understand everything, said Miro. I want to know everything and put it all together to see what it means. Excellent project, she said. It will look very good on your résumé.

Jane first found herself between the stars, her thoughts playing among the vibrations of the philotic strands of the ansible net.

hatch. I wouldn't risk another high-speed dock if we don't have to.

if he maintained that speed and went outside, the ship would appear to him as if it wasn't moving at all since he would be moving at the same velocity. But going outside at a high velocity was risky. He'd expose himself to gamma radiation and the threat of micrometeoroids. Getting hit by a tiny rock particle would likely be fatal. Victor couldn't take that risk. Not with so much at stake. It would

And because it was possible, there was a part of him that wanted to play it out, see where this path led. I

Speculative fiction by definition is geared toward an audience that wants strangeness, an audience that wants to spend time in worlds that absolutely are not like the observable world around them.

It was better, she thought, to be able to select from the whole menu of human achievements than to be bound within one narrow range.

People always go. Always. They always believe they can make a better life than in the old world." "What the hell, maybe they can.

Peter, pretending to take a crushed pea out of his nose

Oh! it is absurd to have a hard-and-fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.

Ah! realize your youth while you have it. Don't squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar. These are the sickly aims, the false ideals, of our age. Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing.

Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.

America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.