Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination.

As many authors have said, if the writer is not surprised by events, then chances are that the reader will not be either, and grow bored.

Science fiction at its best should be crazy and dangerous, not sane and safe.

A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.

[Science fiction is] out in the mainstream now. You can tell by the way mainstream literary authors pillage SF while denying they're writing it!

Her concern with landscapes and living creatures was passionate. This concern, feebly called, the love of nature seemed to Shevek to be something much broader than love. There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus. It was strange to see Takver take a leaf into her hand, or even a rock. She became an extension of it, it of her.

In case you haven't noticed, they're moving a lot faster. I don't know about the laws of physics on your planet, but where I come from an object moving at subclass speed can't catch up to one running at starclass. But if you know something about turbines, thrusters and engines, quantum or classical physics that I've somehow missed, then please enlighten me.- Caillen Dagan to Desideria Denarii

Everything about us, everything around us, everything we know and can know of is composed ultimately of patterns of nothing; that's the bottom line, the final truth. So where we find we have any control over those patterns, why not make the most elegant ones, the most enjoyable and good ones, in our own terms? Yes, we're hedonists, Mr. Bora Horza Gobuchul. We seek pleasure and have fashioned ourselves so that we can take more of it; admitted. We are what we are. But what about you? What does that make you?

Which came first, the mind or the idea of the mind? Have you never wondered? They arrived together. The mind is an idea.

Sometimes I think I must have a Guardian Idiot. A little invisible spirit just behind my shoulder, looking out for me...only he's an imbecile.

Would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?

My doctor says that I have a malformed public-duty gland and a natural deficiency in moral fibre and that I am therefore excused from saving universes.

Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.

Nothing travels faster than the speed of light, with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.

I simply regard romantic comedies as a subgenre of sci-fi, in which the world created therein has different rules than my regular human world.

Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.

Isn't it interesting that the same people who laugh at science fiction listen to weather forecasts and economists?

I wish outer space guys would conquer the earth and make people their pets, because Ed like to have one of those little beds with my name on it.

Science Fiction: fairy tales for nerds.

Science fiction is never about the future, in the same way history is rarely about the past: they're both parable formats for examining or commenting on the present.