Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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. "

Related Quotes:

" 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

Understand

Person

" What Bradbury had that most other science-fiction writers didn't have at that time was a love for beautiful language, evocative description, and haunting phrases that would stick with the reader. "

" 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. "

" Everything that I can do to ground the story in reality helps make it harder for people to be dismissive of it. "

" Bradbury was the one guy who was published in places like the 'Saturday Evening Post.' He was the guy who brought science fiction to the masses. If he hadn't existed, science fiction would have been a well-kept secret in literature instead of a widely consumed phenomenon. "

" 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. "

" Science fiction has never been about the future; it's always been about the present day whether it's Victorian England that Wells was writing about or the post-9/11 era that I'm writing about. "

" 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. "

" Psychopathy might lurk behind the mask of sanity. "

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

" 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

Childhood

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

Robert J. Sawyer

Would

Write

" 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. "

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

" Science fiction has always used metaphors and disguises, talking about alien civilizations or the future. "

" One of the things that science fiction gets to do is thought experiments about the human condition that would be impractical or unethical to conduct in real life. "

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

" The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics is the world's greatest pure physics thinktank, and it's located here in Canada, in Waterloo, Ont. "

" 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. "

" Science fiction's power, if it has any, is that it gives us reasonable extrapolations, not wild and woolly stuff. "

Robert J. Sawyer

Wild

Power

" I am very pro-science. "

Robert J. Sawyer

I Am

Very

" 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. "

" 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

Intelligence

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "