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.
Never fire a laser at a mirror.
Any damn fool can predict the past.
We should not have assumed that a political space station could be built.
Intelligence is just a tool to be used toward a goal, and goals are not always chosen intelligently.
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.
The Unexpected always comes at the most awkward times.
In general, I don’t know when inspiration will pop up.
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.
Anything you don’t understand is dangerous until you do understand it.
I do not believe they’ve run out of surprises.
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.
We’re looking as far ahead as we can, and we don’t get penalized for mistakes.
In challenging a kzin, a simple scream of rage is sufficient. You scream and you leap.
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.
Jesus Pietro wasn’t used to dealing with ghosts. It would require brand new techniques. Grimly he set out to evolve them.
Anything that can go wrong, will.
There is no cause so good or noble that it will not attract fuggheads; and the fuggheads will get all the press.
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.
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.