Quotes About Speculation

A realist writer might break his protagonist's leg, or kill his fiancee; but a science fiction writer will immolate whole planets, and whilst doing so he will be more concerned with the placement of commas than the screams of the dying.

Let us say that science fiction is a kind of conceptual disorientation of the familiar.

science fiction begins not with Gernsback, Wells, Verne or Shelley, but rather with the Protestant Reformation, when science as we now understand the term began to separate itself from magic as the idiom for fantastic voyages, utopias, future speculation and technological extrapolation.

Adventure upon all the tickets in the lottery, and you lose for certain and the greater the number of your tickets the nearer your approach to this certainty.

We find ourselves at once in prehistory and in science fiction [ Shakespeare's Sisters .

I'm pretty sure that I was JFK in my past life.

Perhaps at a later point important developments will be traced back to September 11. But for now we do not know which of the many scenarios will actually hold in the future.

I perpetuate rumors that I've dated people that I've never actually dated.

Rumor is not always wrong.

sages leave speculation to the idle, and contemplate Nature.

Speculative markets have always been vulnerable to illusion. But seeing the folly in markets provides no clear advantage in forecasting outcomes, because changes in the force of the illusion are difficult to predict.

I don't think an alien will be a blob. If aliens are out there they should have evolved just like us. They should have eyes and be walking on two legs. In short if there is any life out there then it is likely to be very similar to us.

Every time we get a story that says there was a Big Bang, then people want to know what was before that. And if we find out, what was before that?

In 100 billion years, the universe will be a very strange place.

I don't know what happens if they get bin Laden. I'm much more interested in what happens if they don't get bin Laden.

I might be the next Bond girl, who knows?

But as a result of that, there was, once the show ended, there was this talk for sort of four, five months about what was going to happen, and if we were going to move to Showtime, and if we were going to be bought by ABC or whatever.

I don't think there will ever be a GG box set.

When Jen Aniston and Brad Pitt broke up, I was dying to see something that said they were getting back together.

In a bubble, anyone who argues pessimistically is seen as crazy.

In classical times, it was a capital offense to speculate upon the hour of a king's death or upon the identity of his successor.

When suddenly everybody is guessing, or some even getting close, to the ballpark of what you're earning - well, that's interesting, that everyone knows what you make.

Science fiction is the most important literature in the history of the world, because it's the history of ideas, the history of our civilization birthing itself. ...Science fiction is central to everything we've ever done, and people who make fun of science fiction writers don't know what they're talking about.

Do you ever wonder if--well, if there are people living on the third planet?' 'The third planet is incapable of supporting life,' stated the husband patiently. 'Our scientists have said there's far too much oxygen in their atmosphere.