Larry Niven Quotes

Bruce Sterling is one terrific writer and he's relatively new, but I don't know how long he's been doing it; he probably doesn't need the publicity anymore!

- Larry Niven

But... watching Steven Barnes taught me to treat my life like an art form.

- Larry Niven

SF isn't a genre; SF is the matrix in which genres are embedded, and because the SF field is never going in any one direction at any one time, there is hardly a way to cut it off.

- Larry Niven

The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program.

- Larry Niven

I'd visit the near future, close enough that someone might want to talk to Larry Niven and can figure out the language; distant enough to get me decent medical techniques and a ticket to the Moon.

- Larry Niven

I do not believe they've run out of surprises.

- Larry Niven

In hindsight it may even seem inevitable that a socialist society will starve when it runs out of capitalists.

- Larry Niven

I've got five or six unpublished stories kicking around looking for somebody to buy them.

- Larry Niven

I do suspect that privacy was a passing fad.

- Larry Niven

The human species really could have faced global thermonuclear war. During seventy years of Cold War we grew used to it.

- Larry Niven

We need to take command of the solar system to gain that wealth, and to escape the sea of paper our government is becoming, and for some decent chance of stopping a Dinosaur Killer asteroid.

- Larry Niven

I never got good at predicting what millions of people will suddenly decide is rational.

- Larry Niven

As for AIDS, it's a plague. We are human, we get plagues. They come along every so often, kill off two thirds of the population; in the next generation it's a quarter; after that it's a childhood disease.

- Larry Niven

We're looking as far ahead as we can, and we don't get penalized for mistakes.

- Larry Niven

Building one space station for everyone was and is insane: we should have built a dozen.

- Larry Niven

We should not have assumed that a political space station could be built.

- Larry Niven

And every friend I've got has been writing Mars stories. It was pretty clear I'd never catch up.

- Larry Niven

Anything beats an expensive stack of paper.

- Larry Niven

Everything starts as somebody's daydream.

- Larry Niven

My problem with new writers is that it takes me five or six years to memorise the right names.

- Larry Niven

I'm not predicting; I just love playing with superconductors.

- Larry Niven

In general, I don't know when inspiration will pop up.

- Larry Niven

I've spent a lot of my life among people brighter than myself.

- Larry Niven

I'd repair our education system or replace it with something that works.

- Larry Niven

Treat your life like something to be sculpted.

- Larry Niven