QUOTES by Robert J. Sawyer
Find most favourite and famour Authors from A.A Milne to Zoe Kravitz.
When we have machines that are as intelligent - and then twice as intelligent - as we are, there is no reason why that relationship cannot be synergistic rather than antagonistic.
Quote by -Robert J. Sawyer
A lot of people forget that the origin of science fiction in the U.S. was in the post-First World War period when there was a real interest to get people into technical careers.
Quote by -Robert J. Sawyer
All the things that made us basically nasty, rapacious, competitive as a species are not necessarily hard-coded into whatever passes for the DNA of artificial intelligence.
Quote by -Robert J. Sawyer
Once we no longer have the intellectual upper hand, then we quite literally, by definition, cannot outwit our successors. So unless we are absolutely sure that the machines we are building right now are not going to eventually become our new robot overlords, prudence is called for.
Quote by -Robert J. Sawyer
I'm much more interested in writing about the things that engage and enrage me as an adult rather than in wallowing in childhood sorrows.
Quote by -Robert J. Sawyer
Writing is transmogrifying, not just for the reader but also for the author; an author becomes someone he or she isn't by living the lives of his or her characters.
Quote by -Robert J. Sawyer
Social progress is a big thing for me. Although science fiction is traditionally concerned with the hard sciences, which is chemistry, physics, and, some might argue, biology, my father was and still is a social scientist at the University of Toronto.
Quote by -Robert J. Sawyer
In addition to psychopaths, 'Quantum Night' is also a novel about literally thoughtless people, without inner voices, thoughts in their heads.
Quote by -Robert J. Sawyer
I started wondering why it is that people line up behind charismatic leaders. It's easy to understand the emergence of a figure who's narcissistic and compelling. But why people follow this person mindlessly - that was the hard question to me.
Quote by -Robert J. Sawyer
Everything that I can do to ground the story in reality helps make it harder for people to be dismissive of it.
Quote by -Robert J. Sawyer
You fall into a black hole, and you are irretrievably gone from the universe. That finality has made it irresistible to writers.
Quote by -Robert J. Sawyer
The general public still thinks that science fiction has nothing to do with their day-to-day lives.
Quote by -Robert J. Sawyer
The traditional route to success in science fiction is by making a name for yourself in short fiction, so people who read science fiction magazines will recognize your byline on a novel.
Quote by -Robert J. Sawyer
If you look at the United States, most of the country is pretty much uninhabited.
Quote by -Robert J. Sawyer
Real people are complex, contradictory, and have their own motivations - they can't just be mouthpieces for the writers' point of view.
Quote by -Robert J. Sawyer
I really strived to give equal weight to the two halves of my genre's name: science and fiction.
Quote by -Robert J. Sawyer
I'm often characterized as an optimistic writer, and certainly my 'Neanderthal Parallax' and 'WWW' trilogies shade toward the utopian. I like to think that's not simple naivete, but rather a reasonable approach.
Quote by -Robert J. Sawyer
The only shows that Americans watch in big numbers are shows about lawyers, doctors, or cops... People don't tune in to watch scientists unless they are forensic scientists.
Quote by -Robert J. Sawyer
I'm a member of the Writers Guild of America and the Writers Guild of Canada.
Quote by -Robert J. Sawyer
I was paid more for the serialization rights for each book than I got as an advance for my first novel. In other words, there is an economic value in serialization in and of itself.
Quote by -Robert J. Sawyer
There were four major 20th-century science fiction writers: Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein and Ray Bradbury. Of those four, the first three were all published principally in science-fiction magazines. They were preaching to the converted.
Quote by -Robert J. Sawyer
Hard science fiction, which is what I write, often is rightly criticized for having either negligible or unbelievable characterization, but the science I've actually studied most post-secondarily is psychology, and characterization is the art of dramatizing psychological principles.
Quote by -Robert J. Sawyer
I think most people are indifferent in their evaluation of what is good or bad.
Quote by -Robert J. Sawyer
The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics is the world's greatest pure physics thinktank, and it's located here in Canada, in Waterloo, Ont.
Quote by -Robert J. Sawyer
Whether it's created in a lab, written by a programmer, or lands on the White House lawn as a visitor from the stars, if it acts like a human being, it is a human being.
Quote by -Robert J. Sawyer
I'm a fiction writer, and fiction is telling the lives of unreal people. But the only way you can learn to do that well is by really understanding the lives of real people.
Quote by -Robert J. Sawyer
Many science-fiction writers, such as Gregory Benford, are working scientists. Many others, such as Joe Haldeman, have advanced degrees in science. Others, like me, have backgrounds in science and technology journalism.
Quote by -Robert J. Sawyer
Science fiction should not be dismissed as escapism. It is a profound vehicle for talking about social and political issues.
Quote by -Robert J. Sawyer
When I started publishing - my first novel came out in 1990 - there were no options for publishing science fiction in Canada. There were no small presses, and the large presses simply would not touch it at all.
Quote by -Robert J. Sawyer
One of the things that science fiction gets to do is thought experiments about the human condition that would be impractical or unethical to conduct in real life.
Quote by -Robert J. Sawyer
An agnostic is someone who believes the nature of the Divine is unknowable... and in that sense, I'm willing to subscribe to being an agnostic.
Quote by -Robert J. Sawyer
Science fiction has always used metaphors and disguises, talking about alien civilizations or the future.
Quote by -Robert J. Sawyer
You can't be a 21st-century science fiction writer writing about Mars without doing tips of the hat to Edgar Rice Burroughs, to Ray Bradbury, to H.G. Wells, to the guys who first put it in the public imagination that Mars was an exciting place.
Quote by -Robert J. Sawyer
There's always been a quality to being a science-fiction reader. Usually, you're the only one in your class, or there are only one or two in your whole town. You're always the guy who reads that strange stuff.
Quote by -Robert J. Sawyer
By serializing two novels in 'Analog,' the world's No. 1, best-selling science fiction magazine, I've had 200,000 words of fiction and three cover stories in that magazine. Quite an enviable record.
Quote by -Robert J. Sawyer
Traditionally, the science fiction reader has been the 16- to 24-year-old male, especially the male with an interest in technology.
Quote by -Robert J. Sawyer
If you like 'The Nature of Things,' or if you like 'Quirks and Quarks' you'll certainly like Lee Smolin's writing, and 'Time Reborn' is his latest nonfiction book, and it's an absolutely compelling read. It's worth the time.
Quote by -Robert J. Sawyer
When the state was going to tell you what your future would be, science fiction was irrelevant.
Quote by -Robert J. Sawyer
What Bradbury had that most other science-fiction writers didn't have at that time was a love for beautiful language, evocative description, and haunting phrases that would stick with the reader.
Quote by -Robert J. Sawyer
I'm a rationalist. And I can see no evidence for a benevolent and interventionist creator.
Quote by -Robert J. Sawyer