Quotes About Speculation

We'll never know if I could have made it to the NFL. Do I think so? Yeah.

Science fiction is the field that explores how change can affect us, for well or ill.

In a sense, if you're not getting it wrong really a lot when you're creating imaginary futures, then you're just not doing it enough. You're not creating enough imaginary futures.

Imagination has rules, but we can only guess what they are.

The science fiction world has a lot of people doing seriously imaginative thinking.

I can't stop people from writing imaginative stories about me entering politics.

In the NBA, you're never immune to rumors and trade rumors and free agency stuff.

I think the least important thing about science fiction for me is its predictive capacity.

I think the least important thing about science fiction for me is its predictive capacity. Its record for being accurately predictive is really, really poor! If you look at the whole history of science fiction, what people have said is going to happen, what writers have said is going to happen, and what actually happened - it's terrible.

SF is the literature of the theoretically possible, and F is the literature of the impossible.

Using his models, his computers look for moments when the short-term traders are moving opposite to the long-term investors-and then he bets that the imbalance will correct itself.

A speculator is a man who observes the future, and acts before it occurs.

Bill Brittain

Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.

The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us.

Thinking about time travel may seem like something humans have been doing since the first caveman dropped the first rock on his foot. But, even to begin to imagine the possibility of time travel, your mind must be able to wrap itself around the notion of a past and a future.

In falling markets, there is nothing that has not happened before. The bear or pessimist sees only the past, which imprisons the wretched financial soul in eternal circles of boom and bust and boom again.

I don't think I've ever really been a science fiction writer. I'm closer to a fantasist, speculative fiction, whatever, but labels are ultimately derogatory, and I eschew them as best I can.

When I think about myself as a writer, for sure I am a science fiction writer. The tools of extrapolation, the tools of anticipating the future - those are science fictional questions.

We sat around on a hotel balcony with a bottle of wine and tried to figure out how you would go about blowing up a planet. That's the kind of conversations science fiction writers have when they get together. We don't talk about football or anything like that.

Science fiction writers aren't fortune tellers. Fortune tellers are fakes.

Once anthropology and geology had opened up the pre-recordkeeping darkness of humanity's long, slow, sustained infancy as suitable grounds for speculation, writers began trying to imagine human existence as it must have been with only stone-age technology.

Science fiction writers aren't in the prediction business; they're in the speculation business, using 'hasn't happened' or 'hasn't happened yet' to create entertaining scenarios that may or may not anticipate future realities.

I said, 'If other beings besides us exist on Earth, why didn't we meet them a long time ago?