A biography for Larry Nivenhasn’t been written yet.
“I've spent a lot of my life among people brighter than myself.”
“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.”
“The value of a thing is what that thing will bring. -Legal Maxim”
“My problem with new writers is that it takes me five or six years to memorise the right names.”
“The human species really could have faced global thermonuclear war. During seventy years of Cold War we grew used to 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”
“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.”
“I do not believe they've run out of surprises.”
“We need to take command of the solar system to gain that wealth, and to escape the sea of paper our government is becoming, and for some decent chance of stopping a Dinosaur Killer asteroid.”
“I never got good at predicting what millions of people will suddenly decide is rational.”
“Anything beats an expensive stack of paper.”
“Everything starts as somebody's daydream.”
“And every friend I've got has been writing Mars stories. It was pretty clear I'd never catch up.”
“The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program.”
“Treat your life like something to be sculpted.”
“Never tell a computer to forget it.”
“As for AIDS, it's a plague. We are human, we get plagues. They come along every so often, kill off two thirds of the population; in the next generation it's a quarter; after that it's a childhood disease.”
“The gods do not protect fools. Fools are protected by more capable fools.”
“But... watching Steven Barnes taught me to treat my life like an art form.”