The first 90% of the job takes 90% of the time. The remaining 10% of the job requires another 90% of the time. The first condition of immortality is death.

We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don't know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is.

A smart machine will first consider which is more worth its while: to perform the given task or, instead, to figure some way out of it.

There is only one positive role of the Nobel prize--it creates some common way to understand a writer. I cannot say, that I like this situation, but that's the way it goes. The books are being born and then walk around the world, just as children do.

A writer should not run around with a mirror for his countrymen; he should tell his society and his times things no one ever thought before.

I do not like the way people use the more and more magnificent fruits of technology to their filthy deeds.

Solaristics, wrote Muntius, is a substitute for religion in the space age. It is faith wrapped in the cloak of science; contact, the goal for which we are striving, is as vague and obscure as communion with the saints or the coming of the Messiah.