Best 65 quotes of Larry Niven on MyQuotes

A civilization has the ethics it can afford

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

Any damn fool can predict the past.

Anything beats an expensive stack of paper.

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!

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

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

Consider the true picture. Think of myriads of tiny bubbles, very sparsely scattered, rising through a vast black sea. We rule some of the bubbles. Of the waters we know nothing.

Everything starts as somebody's daydream.

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.

Hopeless causes are the only ones worth fighting for. The fight for the taxpayer is the most hopeless of them all.

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.

I do not believe they've run out of surprises.

I do suspect that privacy was a passing fad.

I'd visit the near future, close enough that someone might want to talk to Larry Niven and can figure out the language; distant enough to get me decent medical techniques and a ticket to the Moon.

If one must explain a magic trick, one should do so after the show is over.

I have a kind of psychic invisibility. As long as I can stay scared, I can keep people from seeing me. That's what we have to count on.

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

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

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

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

In the world of words the imagination is one of the forces of nature.

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.

I've got five or six unpublished stories kicking around looking for somebody to buy them.

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

Jesus Pietro wasn't used to dealing with ghosts. It would require brand new techniques. Grimly he set out to evolve them.

Love was a delicious blend of warm and cold. There was comfort in making love. It solved no problems: but one could run away from problems.

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

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

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

Never fire a laser at a mirror.

Never tell a computer to forget it.

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.

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.

Psi and/or magical powers, if real, are nearly useless.

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.

Sometimes there's no point in giving up.

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.

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.

Stupidity is always a capital crime.

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.

The brightest minds in our field have been trying to find a definition of science fiction for these past seventy years. The short answer is, science fiction stories are given as possible, not necessarily here and now, but somewhere, sometime.

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

The Gods do not protect fools. Fools are protected by more capable fools.

The human species really could have faced global thermonuclear war. During seventy years of Cold War we grew used to it.

The perversity of the Universe tends towards a maximum.

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

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.