Larry Niven Quotes

59 quotes in 772 categories

• Building one space station for everyone was and is insane: we should have built a dozen.
• Everything starts as somebody's daydream.
• Boredom is my worst enemy. It's killed a lot of my friends, but it won't get me. When I get bored, I go risk my…
• The reader has certain rights. He bought your story. Think of this as an implicit contract. He's entitled to be entertained, instructed, amused; maybe all…
• It is a cardinal sin to bore the reader.
• In the world of words the imagination is one of the forces of nature.
• There is a technical, literary term for those who mistake the opinions and beliefs of characters in a novel for those of the author. The…
• It's very difficult for a black man to get out of South-Central Los Angeles, and get out civilized....The only men I know who have escaped,…
• The value of a thing is what that thing will bring. -Legal Maxim
• I am trying to prevent a bloodbath. Is that clear enough for you? I'm trying to prevent a civil war that could kill half the…
• Hopeless causes are the only ones worth fighting for. The fight for the taxpayer is the most hopeless of them all.
• Psi and/or magical powers, if real, are nearly useless.
• Consider the true picture. Think of myriads of tiny bubbles, very sparsely scattered, rising through a vast black sea. We rule some of the bubbles.…
• And every friend I've got has been writing Mars stories. It was pretty clear I'd never catch up.
• Anything beats an expensive stack of paper.
• 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;…
• 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…
• But... watching Steven Barnes taught me to treat my life like an art form.
• I do suspect that privacy was a passing fad.
• I don't have a strong interest in history.

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