Quotes by Science Fiction Writers

[O]ld enough to be wise yet young enough to be willing to partake in an arduous crusade.
Donald Kingsbury
Resistance, however, is useless. (1939)
A.E. van Vogt
The teacher took two long strides and stood beside Parker’s desk. Before the boy could speak, Mr. Earl threw the desktop open. For a second, he stared into it. A white glow reflected off his face.“What is this?” he said, as he reached toward the brightness. “Careful, Mr. Earl,” Parker started to say, but it was too late.The teacher screeched before lurching against the desk. He went down quickly, his feet vanishing into the desk last.
James Van Pelt
I do what I can,' I said. 'When I can do more, I will. You know that.
Octavia E. Butler
I just knew there were stories I wanted to tell.
Octavia E. Butler
Writing fiction feels like an adventurous act, nudging aside reality a word at a time.
James Van Pelt
Just because your electronics are better than ours, you aren't necessarily superior in any way. Look, imagine that you humans are a man in LA with a brand-new Trujillo and we are a nuhp in New York with a beat-up old Ford. The two fellows start driving toward St. Louis. Now, the guy in the Trujillo is doing 120 on the interstates, and the guy in the Ford is putting along at 55; but the human in the Trujillo stops in Vegas and puts all of his gas money down the hole of a blackjack table, and the determined little nuhp cruises along for days until at last he reaches his goal. It's all a matter of superior intellect and the will to succeed. Your people talk a lot about going to the stars, but you just keep putting your money into other projects, like war and popular music and international athletic events and resurrecting the fashions of previous decades. If you wanted to go into space, you would have.
George Alec Effinger
But, as I understand it, your God is a universal God; He is God on all suns and all planets. Surely, then, He must have universal form? Would it not be a staggering vanity to imagine that He can manifest Himself only in the form that is appropriate to this particular, not very important planet?
John Wyndham
You don't start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it's good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That's why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.
Octavia E. Butler
for a purpose without reason
Donald Kingsbury
One cannot take a coward on dangerous missions or trust one’s fortune to a fool. How then are cowards and fools to be employed?
Donald Kingsbury
Prayers only help the person doing the praying, and then, only if they strengthen and focus that person's resolve.
Octavia E. Butler
Listen, no part of me is more definitive of who I am than my brain.
Octavia E. Butler
People do blame you for the things they do to you.
Octavia E. Butler
This is the biggest lot of abolitionist trash I ever saw.”“No it isn’t,” I said. “That book wasn’t even written until a century after slavery was abolished.”“Then why the hell are they still complaining about it?
Octavia E. Butler
The mist enveloped her form. She was lifted into it, then instantly dropped. Swiftly, the mist retreated to the window.It was gone. The old woman lay flat on her back, eyes open and staring; her mouth open, too, unprettily.That was the over-all effect - the utter lack of anything beautiful.("The Witch")
A.E. van Vogt
What we do with the product of genius is first of all ram it down to the lowest common denominator and then multiply it by the vulgarest possible fraction. -from "Pawley's Peepholes
John Wyndham
Everything is so soft here,' he said, 'so easy...' 'I know
Octavia E. Butler
Already, in the last few decades, you have realized the utter futility of of encumbering yourselves with superfluous possessions that have no useful virtue, but which, for various sentimental reasons, you continue to hoard, thus lessening your life's efficiency by using for it time and attention that should have been applied to the practical work of life's accomplishments. (The Miracle of the Lily - 1928)
Clare Winger Harris
I began writing about power because I had so little.
Octavia E. Butler
I wasn't trying to work out my own ancestry. I was trying to get people to feel slavery. I was trying to get across the kind of emotional and psychological stones that slavery threw at people.
Octavia E. Butler
England was a cold, backward, rebellious little kingdom. It's king: Henry the Eighth, remembered principally for his six wives and the chicken legs clutched in his fat fists.
Kage Baker
We all have our youthful follies, embarassing to recall -- but people somehow find it hard to dismiss as a youthful folly anything that has happened to be a financial success.
John Wyndham
Jesus, what a nuisance it was, being desperate to stay alive.
George Alec Effinger
We've got to believe that God is sane, Davie boy. We'd be lost indeed if we didn't do that.
John Wyndham
 “Your Tim is so unmistakably a healthy extravert type. Mens stulta in corpore sano, and all that.”“Exactly,” she agreed.
John Wyndham
But not she. Her eternity is an article of her faith. Great wars and disasters can ebb and flow, races rise and fall, empires wither with suffering and death, but these are superficialities: she, woman, is perpetual, essential; she will go on for ever.
John Wyndham
Mathematics has always shown a curious ability to be applicable to nature, and this may express a deep link between our minds and nature. We are the Universe speaking out, a part of nature. So it is not so surprising that our systems of logic and mathematics sing in tune with nature.
George Zebrowski
Beware:Ignorance Protects itself.IgnorancePromotes suspicion.SuspicionEngenders fear.Fear quails,Irrational and blind,Or fear looms,Defiant and closed.Blind, closed,Suspicious, afraid,IgnoranceProtects itself,And protected,Ignorance grows.
Octavia E. Butler
What is the future going to be like, then?' 'Hey, it's gonna be a gas,' Scape assured me. 'If you're into machines and stuff - like I am - you'd go for it. People are gonna have all kinds of shit. Do whatever they want with it. That's why it didn't faze me when ol' Bendray first told me about wanting to blow up the world. Hey - in the Future, everybody will want to!
K.W. Jeter
I found that I couldn't muster any belief in a literal heaven or hell, anyway. I thought the best we could all do was to look after one another and clean up the various hells we've made right here on earth.
Octavia E. Butler
[H]e was still young enough to think that there was something fundamentally inhuman about thinking more than one step ahead at a time.
Hal Clement
Bloodchild" is my pregnant man story.
Octavia E. Butler
God is Change.Earthseed: The Books of the LivingLauren Oya Olamina
Octavia E. Butler
People have the right to call themselves whatever they like. That doesn't bother me. It's other people doing the calling that bothers me.
Octavia E. Butler
Looking around me, I saw that all my colleagues were busy at the same task. Eyes were rolled up, mouths hung open, here and there a finger twitched. It had to be either a day trip from the Catatonic Academy, or the modern press at work.
John Varley
At the end of the second week they were still working and Arretapec, Conway and their patient were being talked, whistled, cheeped and grunted about in every language in use at the hospital.
James White
The full impact of the Lobachevskian method of challenging axioms has probably yet to be felt. It is no exaggeration to call Lobachevsky the Copernicus of Geometry [as did Clifford], for geometry is only a part of the vaster domain which he renovated; it might even be just to designate him as a Copernicus of all thought.
Eric Temple Bell
You are hierarchical. That's the older and more entrenched characteristic. We saw it in your closest animal relatives and in your most distant ones. It's a terrestrial characteristic. When human intelligence served it instead of guiding it, when human intelligence did not even acknowledge it as a problem, but took pride in it or did not notice it at all... That was like ignoring cancer.
Octavia E. Butler
He couldn't think of a good place. At first he thought she hated all living beings equally. Lately he had come to believe he held a special place in her heart, just below rattlesnakes, pederasts, and spirochetes. Definitely a tough place to start from, but determination had always been Conal's strong point.
John Varley
Contradictions do not perplex the logician. They arise because there are more rules to an open game than can be known.
Donald Kingsbury
You have to remember that I was a bright but simple fellow from Canada who seldom, if ever, met another writer, and then only a so-called literary type that occasionally sold a story and meanwhile worked in an office for a living.
A.E. van Vogt
He had the beginning of wrinkles and the easy manner of one who has already made his mistakes.
Donald Kingsbury
We collected all the bones we could find, and yesterday, Natividad wrapped them in a shawl that she had knitted years ago. It was the most beautiful thing she owned."A thing like that should serve the living," Bankole said when she offered it."You are living," Natividad said. "I like you. I wish I could have met your sister.
Octavia E. Butler
That's what you get,' he said, nodding towards a group of the men engaged in some close-order military drill, 'when you give people Bibles and guns. You should give 'em either one or the other, but not both. It just messes up their brains.
K.W. Jeter
I'm Valerie Rye,' she said, savoring the words. 'It's all right for you to talk to me.
Octavia E. Butler
BewareAt war Or at peace,More people die Of unenlightened self-interestThan of any other disease
Octavia E. Butler
There's a difference between religion and faith," Chandi said, "Religion means you've accepted a set of beliefs even if those beliefs would appear to be irrational to anyone who doesn't buy into them. Faith means you've chosen to accept something that you've given yourself the chance to question.
Allen Steele
Boy, you're good at figuring things out. Isn't he? Except that if anybody's the devil in this room it's _you_, buster." An extraordinary bitterness came into his face. "I've seen you before. I know you, all right, preacher man. Age after age, you come back. You always lead the crusades. You're so damned golden-tongued, other people just flock to die for your causes. You die with them, it's true, because you're stupid enough to believe your own great lies; but you always come back again somehow. Oh, I know _you_.
Kage Baker
Well, that was one thing you had to give [Makann] credit for. He wanted to run out the Gilgameshers. Everybody was in favor of that.Now, Trask could remember something he'd gotten from Harkaman. There had been Hitler, back at the end of the First Century Pre-Atomic; hadn't he gotten into power because everybody was in favor of running out the Christians, or the Moslems, or the Albigensians, or somebody?
H. Beam Piper
Darling, whose book is this to be?""Ostensibly yours, my sweet""I see -- rather like my life since I met you?""Yes darling
John Wyndham
If you ordered up a whore here, you'd probably get a theater major doing Joan Crawford as Sadie Thompson. I wonder what would happen if I ordered up a Hershey bar?" His eyes lit up for a moment. "I wonder what would happen if I ordered up a whore and a Hershey bar?
Kage Baker
Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution and you get the problem back. Sometimes the problem has mutated or disappeared. Often it is still there as strong as it ever was.
Donald Kingsbury
Before he could lose courage he flung himself back and slammed his sleep-inducer to full theta.
James Tiptree Jr.
A woman stood in front of her with the peculiar poise that comes before the discovery of age and after the loss of innocence.
Donald Kingsbury
You believe in God?" demanded Billy Karma."I believe in thirty-seven separate and distinct gods," answered Argyle proudly. "That puts me thirty-six ahead of you.""It makes you a pagan.""It makes you a man of limited vision," said Argyle.
Mike Resnick
In order to rise from its own ashes, a Phoenix first must burn.
Octavia E. Butler
Let them see that you trust them & let them solve their own problems, make their own decisions.Do that & they will commit their lives to you. Bully the, control them out of fear or malice or just for your own convenience, & after a while you'll have to spend all your time thinking for them, controlling them, & stifling their resentment.
Octavia E. Butler
Anybody who has had a great treasure has always led a precarious existence.
John Wyndham
The essentials," I answered, "are to learn to shape God with forethought, care, and work; to educate and benefit their community, their families, and themselves; and to contribute to the fulfillment of the Destiny.
Octavia E. Butler