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" 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. "

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" I think there's always been, to some degree, a misunderstanding about what science fiction is all about, in that it has been judged by the general public as being literature of prediction, and it isn't. "

Robert J. Sawyer

Science

Think

Always

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The fact we exist merely means we exist. That's all it means. "

" By serializing two novels in 'Analog,' the world's No. 1, best-selling science fiction magazine, I've had 200,000 words of fiction and three cover stories in that magazine. Quite an enviable record. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" George Orwell's science-fiction classic 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' wasn't a failure because the future it predicted failed to come to pass. Rather, it was a resounding success because it helped us prevent that future. "

Robert J. Sawyer

Success

Classic

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

" The heart and soul of good writing is research; you should write not what you know but what you can find out about. "

" My personal mission statement is to combine the intimately human and the grandly cosmic. I like to think that science fiction works on these two different scales. "

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

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

" Sci-fi is just as much about social science as technology. "

" I've had many of my books optioned. "

" Many science-fiction writers, such as Gregory Benford, are working scientists. Many others, such as Joe Haldeman, have advanced degrees in science. Others, like me, have backgrounds in science and technology journalism. "

Robert J. Sawyer

Technology

Journalism

" When you're changing centuries, people get curious about the future. "

" The traditional route to success in science fiction is by making a name for yourself in short fiction, so people who read science fiction magazines will recognize your byline on a novel. "

" Science fiction should not be dismissed as escapism. It is a profound vehicle for talking about social and political issues. "

" You can't be a 21st-century science fiction writer writing about Mars without doing tips of the hat to Edgar Rice Burroughs, to Ray Bradbury, to H.G. Wells, to the guys who first put it in the public imagination that Mars was an exciting place. "

" When the state was going to tell you what your future would be, science fiction was irrelevant. "

" A lot of people forget that the origin of science fiction in the U.S. was in the post-First World War period when there was a real interest to get people into technical careers. "

" If you look at the United States, most of the country is pretty much uninhabited. "

" 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. "

" I'm a very skeptical guy: my willing suspension of disbelief doesn't go very far when I'm reading other people's SF, and it goes even less far when I'm writing my own. "

" 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. "

" One gets a bit picky after having the success of something like 'FlashForward!' "

Robert J. Sawyer

Something

Success

" I was paid more for the serialization rights for each book than I got as an advance for my first novel. In other words, there is an economic value in serialization in and of itself. "

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