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" I'm a member of the Writers Guild of America and the Writers Guild of Canada. "

Robert J. Sawyer

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" The general public still thinks that science fiction has nothing to do with their day-to-day lives. "

Robert J. Sawyer

" There's always been a quality to being a science-fiction reader. Usually, you're the only one in your class, or there are only one or two in your whole town. You're always the guy who reads that strange stuff. "

Robert J. Sawyer

" All the things that made us basically nasty, rapacious, competitive as a species are not necessarily hard-coded into whatever passes for the DNA of artificial intelligence. "

Robert J. Sawyer

Artificial Intelligence

" Whether it's created in a lab, written by a programmer, or lands on the White House lawn as a visitor from the stars, if it acts like a human being, it is a human being. "

Robert J. Sawyer

" Hard science fiction, which is what I write, often is rightly criticized for having either negligible or unbelievable characterization, but the science I've actually studied most post-secondarily is psychology, and characterization is the art of dramatizing psychological principles. "

Robert J. Sawyer

" Fiction is all about vicarious experiences and getting into other people's heads in a way that no other art form lets you. "

Robert J. Sawyer

" People are looking for a simplicity in their fictional worlds where good and evil are clearly delineated, that you can't find in the real world, and that provides an enormous comfort - and that, I think, has an awful lot to do with the reason fantasy is so popular. "

Robert J. Sawyer

" When I started publishing - my first novel came out in 1990 - there were no options for publishing science fiction in Canada. There were no small presses, and the large presses simply would not touch it at all. "

Robert J. Sawyer

" A short story is the shortest distance between two points; a novel is the scenic route. "

Robert J. Sawyer

" One of the standard story-generating engines for science fiction is to take something we normally think of as metaphoric and treat it as if it were literal. "

Robert J. Sawyer

Science Fiction

" I am very pro-science. "

Robert J. Sawyer

" I started wondering why it is that people line up behind charismatic leaders. It's easy to understand the emergence of a figure who's narcissistic and compelling. But why people follow this person mindlessly - that was the hard question to me. "

Robert J. Sawyer

" I'm much more interested in writing about the things that engage and enrage me as an adult rather than in wallowing in childhood sorrows. "

Robert J. Sawyer

" Our job is not to predict the future. Rather, it's to suggest all the possible futures - so that society can make informed decisions about where we want to go. "

Robert J. Sawyer

" You fall into a black hole, and you are irretrievably gone from the universe. That finality has made it irresistible to writers. "

Robert J. Sawyer

" You have to have confidence in where you're going. Don't live and die by the fans' tweets. "

Robert J. Sawyer

" Once we no longer have the intellectual upper hand, then we quite literally, by definition, cannot outwit our successors. So unless we are absolutely sure that the machines we are building right now are not going to eventually become our new robot overlords, prudence is called for. "

Robert J. Sawyer

" I think most people are indifferent in their evaluation of what is good or bad. "

Robert J. Sawyer

" The standard model of particle physics says that the universe consists of a very small number of particles, 12, and a very small number of forces, four. If we're correct about those 12 particles and those four forces and understand how they interact, properly, we have the recipe for baking up a universe. "

Robert J. Sawyer

" I really strived to give equal weight to the two halves of my genre's name: science and fiction. "

Robert J. Sawyer

" An agnostic is someone who believes the nature of the Divine is unknowable... and in that sense, I'm willing to subscribe to being an agnostic. "

Robert J. Sawyer

" I would love to write more about my hardboiled gumshoe on Mars, Alex Lomax. "

Robert J. Sawyer

" Science fiction is about things that plausibly might happen. Grounding my work in the real world helps make that clear. "

Robert J. Sawyer

" Regrettably, with '2001' having a title that had a year in it, science fiction essentially set itself up in the public's imagination as saying, 'Here's what you get if you wait to that year.' Well, we all waited till that year, and we didn't get anything at all like that. "

Robert J. Sawyer

" The only shows that Americans watch in big numbers are shows about lawyers, doctors, or cops... People don't tune in to watch scientists unless they are forensic scientists. "

Robert J. Sawyer

" A writer needs to write, period. He or she can't wait for the muse, shouldn't need peace and quiet, and isn't entitled to perfect conditions or the perfect spot. "

Robert J. Sawyer

" I'm a fiction writer, and fiction is telling the lives of unreal people. But the only way you can learn to do that well is by really understanding the lives of real people. "

Robert J. Sawyer

" I'm often characterized as an optimistic writer, and certainly my 'Neanderthal Parallax' and 'WWW' trilogies shade toward the utopian. I like to think that's not simple naivete, but rather a reasonable approach. "

Robert J. Sawyer

" The single best thing about Mars is the reduced gravity. It's 38 percent of Earth's gravity - about one third. Almost never have you seen that portrayed in film or television. Mars is just portrayed as a place that's got reddish sand but is otherwise pretty much identical to the Mojave Desert, and that's not the case. "

Robert J. Sawyer

" It's possible that there is a guiding intelligence in our universe. I don't see a lot of personal evidence for an interventionist-on-an-individual-basis-deity. I have friends who very much do believe in that. But I don't. "

Robert J. Sawyer