Larry Niven Quotes

You learn by writing short stories. Keep writing short stories. The money's in novels, but writing short stories keeps your writing lean and pointed.

Humans," said the puppeteer, "should not be allowed to run loose. You will surely harm yourselves.

Everything starts as somebody's daydream.

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

Any damn fool can predict the past.

That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.

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

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.

1. a.Never throw shit at an armed man.
b.Never stand next to someone who
is throwing shit at an armed man.

2.Never fire a laser at a mirror.
3.Mother Nature doesn't care if you're having fun.
4.F x S = k. The product of Freedom and Security is a constant. To gain more freedom of thought and/or action, you must give up some security, and vice versa.
5.Psi and/or magical powers, if real, are nearly useless.
6.It is easier to destroy than create.
7.Any damn fool can predict the past.
8.History never repeats itself.
9.Ethics change with technology.
10.There Ain't No Justice. (often abbreviated to TANJ)
11.Anarchy is the least stable of social structures. It falls apart at a touch.
12.There is a time and place for tact. And there are times when tact is entirely misplaced.
13.The ways of being human are bounded but infinite.
14.The world's dullest subjects, in order:
a.Somebody else's diet.
b.How to make money for a worthy cause.
c.The Kardashians.

15.The only universal message in science fiction: There exist minds that think as well as you do, but differently.
Niven's corollary: The gene-tampered turkey you're talking to isn't necessarily one of them.
16.Fuzzy Pink Niven's Law: Never waste calories.
17.There is no cause so right that one cannot find a fool following it.
in variant form in Fallen Angels as "Niven's Law: No cause is so noble that it won

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

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.

Each nugget of information was fascinating. The world was full of new-found marvels and he wanted to share the excitement with everybody. They all did. They had a certain sense. It wasn't a sense of ennui or cynicism. It was ...
A sense of wonder.
That was it. A sense of wonder, in the fine old original meaning of the word. They wondered at their world. Because when you did that, everything was wonder-full.

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 Earth is just too small and fragile a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in. - Robert A. Heinlein

I see war as that insane enterprise wherein men dig up the riches of the earth and hurl them at one another. - ATTRIBUTED TO JOSEPH DANIEL HARRINGTON

Half of wisdom is learning what to unlearn.

Why hadn't they built a lot of little Ringworlds instead?

Anything you don't understand is dangerous until you do understand it.

Dune; Nova; Double Star; The Corridors of Time; Cat's Cradle; Half Past Human; Murder in Retrospect; Gideon's Day; The Red Right Hand; The Trojan Hearse; A Deadly Shade of Gold; Conjure Wife; Rosemary's Baby; Silverlock; King Conan. He'd packed books not to entertain, nor even to illustrate philosophies of life, but to rebuild civilization.

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

The luck of Teela Brown.

I need exercise and solitude. This time of confinement has threatened my sanity!

The air smelled of ozone and puppeteers.

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

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.

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

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

There is no cause so good or noble that it will not attract fuggheads; and the fuggheads will get all the press.

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.

The puppeteer unrolled completely. 'Did I hear you call me cute?

The hammer has fallen.

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

That's the only part that bugs me about this. It's so empty out there." "True. On the other hand, if the Sun blows up we'll be in an unrivaled position to say, 'What was that?'" "Oh,

Once Louis Wu had sworn to live forever.

Treat your life like something to be sculpted.

Anything beats an expensive stack of paper.

If you can heat some bourbon, I can drink it," said the kzin. "If you cannot heat it, I can still drink it." "Nessus?

Fear is the brother of hate.

Everything starts as somebody's dream.

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.

Never tell a computer to forget it.

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

The value of a thing is what that thing will bring. -Legal Maxim

Nitwit ideas are for emergencies. You use them when you've got nothing else to try. If they work, they go in the Book. Otherwise you follow the Book, which is largely a collection of nitwit ideas that worked.

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

How much intelligence does it take to sneak up on a leaf?

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

Engineers. You had to love them. (The alternative was strangling them, and he didn't want that catching on.) There

Never fire a laser at a mirror.

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

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

There had been a popular joke on Freedom, started by a man named Calder. Looking down from space, he had said, the dominant life forms on Earth were obviously the cereals and other grasses. They occupied all the most desirable and fertile land; and they had tamed insects and animals to care for them. In particular, they had domesticated the bipeds to nurture and cultivate them and to save and plant their seed. Now, watching the farmers, Alex could easily imagine that they were worshiping and genuflecting before their masters.

This place is a playground for a questing mind.

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.

Meet Crazy Eddie

Heat is produced as a waste product of civilization." "I

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

There were the meaningless greetings the humans called "formalities": insincere inquiries into the state of health, nebulous benedictions and hopes for past well-being; all compensations for the lack of human Mediators.

Remember the Finagle Laws. The perversity of the universe tends toward a maximum. The universe is hostile." "But

My fur is matted, my eyes refuse to refocus, my sthondat-begotten room is too small, my microwave heater heats all meat to the same temperature, and it is the wrong temperature, and I cannot get it fixed.

Nessus sprawled bonelessly in his couch. He looked ridiculously, ludicrously comfortable.

I asked him, "Do you know the difference between nude and naked?"
He shook his head.
"Nude is artistic. Naked is defenseless.

Intelligence is just a tool to be used toward a goal, and goals are not always chosen intelligently.

We play your part in order to understand you, but you each seem to play a thousand parts. It makes things difficult for an honest, hard-working bug-eyed monster.

Anything that can go wrong, will

Exercise is wonderful," said Louis. "I could sit and watch it all day.

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.

They used to teach us that evolution of intelligent beings wasn't possible," she said. "Societies protect their weaker members. Civilizations tend to make wheel chairs and spectacles and hearing aids as soon as they have the tools for them. When a society makes war, the men generally have to pass a fitness test before they're allowed, to risk their lives. I suppose it helps win the war." She smiled. "But it leaves precious little room for the survival of the fittest.

Some amiably deranged science-fiction writer had come up with it forty years back and, like so many of his kind, given it away for free - or anyway at fifty cents a word.

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.

Long ago, Louis Wu had stood at the void edge of Mount Lookitthat. The Long Fall River, on that world, ends in the tallest waterfall in known space. Louis's eyes had followed it down as far as they could penetrate the void mist. The featureless white of the void itself had grasped at his mind, and Louis Wu, half hypnotized, had sworn to live forever. How else could he see all there was to see?
Now he reaffirmed that decision.

Cliff shrugged. None of their ideas sounded

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!

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.

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.

Fear is the brother of hate. One

It is a cardinal sin to bore the reader.