Larry Niven

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

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

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

“I don't have a strong interest in history.”

“We should not have assumed that a political space station could be built.”

“Fear is the brother of hate.”

“We're looking as far ahead as we can, and we don't get penalized for mistakes.”

“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.”

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

“I'd repair our education system or replace it with something that works.”

“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!”

“I myself have dreamed up a structure intermediate between Dyson spheres and planets. Build a ring 93 million miles in radius - one Earth orbit - around the sun. If we have the mass of Jupiter to work with, and if we make it a thousand miles wide, we get a thickness of about a thousand feet for the base.And it has advantages. The Ringworld will be much sturdier than a Dyson sphere. We can spin it on its axis for gravity. A rotation speed of 770 m/s will give us a gravity of one Earth normal. We wouldn't even need to roof it over. Place walls one thousand miles high at each edge, facing the sun. Very little air will leak over the edges.Lord knows the thing is roomy enough. With three million times the surface area of the Earth, it will be some time before anyone complains of the crowding.”

“I love superconductors.”

“I do suspect that privacy was a passing fad.”

“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.”

“Never fire a laser at a mirror.”

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

“There were timelines branching and branching, a mega-universe of universes, millions more every minute. Billions? Trillions? The universe split every time someone made a decision. Split, so that every decision ever made could go both ways. Every choice made by every man, woman, and child was reversed in the universe next door.”

“I've got five or six unpublished stories kicking around looking for somebody to buy them.”

“I'm not predicting; I just love playing with superconductors.”