Larry Niven Quotes

Once every hundred years, the Los Angeles smog rolls away for a single night, leaving the air as clean as interstellar space. That way the gods can see if Los Angeles is still there. If it is, they roll the smog back so they won't have to look at it.

Half of wisdom is learning what to unlearn.

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

How much intelligence does it take to sneak up on a leaf?

There had been a popular joke on Freedom, started by a man named Calder. Looking down from space, he had said, the dominant life forms on Earth were obviously the cereals and other grasses. They occupied all the most desirable and fertile land; and they had tamed insects and animals to care for them. In particular, they had domesticated the bipeds to nurture and cultivate them and to save and plant their seed. Now, watching the farmers, Alex could easily imagine that they were worshiping and genuflecting before their masters.

Anything that can go wrong, will

There is no cause so good or noble that it will not attract fuggheads; and the fuggheads will get all the press.

For each human being there is an optimum ratio between change and stasis. Too little change, he grows bored. Too little stability, he panics and loses his ability to adapt. One who marries six times in ten years won't change jobs. One who moves often to serve his company will maintain a stable marriage. A woman chained to one home and family may redecorate frantically or take a lover or go to many costume parties.

Never fire a laser at a mirror.

There were timelines branching and branching, a mega-universe of universes, millions more every minute. Billions? Trillions? The universe split every time someone made a decision. Split, so that every decision ever made could go both ways. Every choice made by every man, woman, and child was reversed in the universe next door.

Everything starts as somebody's daydream.

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

The witnessing of titanic events is always dangerous, usually painful, and often fatal.

Intelligence is just a tool to be used toward a goal, and goals are not always chosen intelligently.

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

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.

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

Species evolve to meet the environment. An intelligent species changes the environment to suit itself. As soon as a species becomes intelligent, it should stop evolving.

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

Mother Nature doesn't care if you're having fun.

That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.

Never tell a computer to forget it.

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 three. If he quits in the middle, or puts the book down feeling his time has been wasted, you're in violation.

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

I don't have a strong interest in history.

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

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 people in this world.

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

A civilization has the ethics it can afford

The best advice I was ever given was on my twenty-first birthday when my father said, Son, here's a million dollars. Don't lose it.

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 term is 'idiot'.

You learn by writing short stories. Keep writing short stories. The money's in novels, but writing short stories keeps your writing lean and pointed.

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

The value of a thing is what that thing will bring. -Legal Maxim

The perversity of the Universe tends towards a maximum.

Spray a book with insect spray, drop it in a bag, add some mothballs and seal it. Put it in another bag and seal it. Another. The packages piled up on the floor, each a book sealed in four plastic envelopes.

In challenging a kzin, a simple scream of rage is sufficient. You scream and you leap.

The Product of Freedom and Security is a constant (F X S = k). Giving up freedom for security is beginning to look naive.

One mark of a good officer, he remembered, was the ability to make quick decisions. If they happen to be right, so much the better.

Never be embarrassed or ashamed by anything you choose to write.

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

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 life somewhere.

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!

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

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

Treat your life like something to be sculpted.

It is a cardinal sin to bore the reader.

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, all began reading Robert Heinlein at age ten.