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.
I am trying to prevent a bloodbath. Is that clear enough for you? I’m trying to prevent a civil war that could kill half the people in this world.
Hopeless causes are the only ones worth fighting for. The fight for the taxpayer is the most hopeless of them all.
I don’t have a strong interest in history.
I do suspect that privacy was a passing fad.
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!
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.
Anything beats an expensive stack of paper.
And every friend I’ve got has been writing Mars stories. It was pretty clear I’d never catch up.
Consider the true picture. Think of myriads of tiny bubbles, very sparsely scattered, rising through a vast black sea. We rule some of the bubbles. Of the waters we know nothing...
Half of wisdom is learning what to unlearn.
The witnessing of titanic events is always dangerous, usually painful, and often fatal.
The human species really could have faced global thermonuclear war. During seventy years of Cold War we grew used to it.
I’ve spent a lot of my life among people brighter than myself.
I’ve got five or six unpublished stories kicking around looking for somebody to buy them.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.
I love superconductors.
Never be embarrassed or ashamed by anything you choose to write.
Treat your life like something to be sculpted.
Fear is the brother of hate.
In a collaboration, each author will do 75% of the work.