Isaac Asimov citations

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I made up my mind long ago to follow one cardinal rule in all my writing — to be clear. [...] I would write merely clearly and in this way establish a warm relationship between myself and my readers, and the professional critics — Well, they can do whatever they wish.
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Invention du mot robotique et première formulation des trois lois de la robotique.
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Le texte précise ainsi quel critère une machine doit appliquer pour distinguer une information vraie d'une fausse.
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À propos de Arthur C. Clarke.
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As quoted in The Mammoth Book of Zingers, Quips, and One-Liners (2004) edited by Geoff Tibballs, p. 299
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Isaac Asimov's Book of Science and Nature Quotations (1988), edited with Jason A. Shulman, p. 281
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Variante: If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster. Časopis LIFE, január 1984

As quoted in Notes for a Memoir : On Isaac Asimov, Life, and Writing (2006) by Janet Jeppson Asimov, p. 58
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Variante: Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.
Contexte: If you suspect that my interest in the Bible is going to inspire me with sudden enthusiasm for Judaism and make me a convert of mountain‐moving fervor and that I shall suddenly grow long earlocks and learn Hebrew and go about denouncing the heathen — you little know the effect of the Bible on me. Properly read, it is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.

Yours, Isaac Asimov (20 September 1973) <!-- page 329 -->
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Contexte: What I will be remembered for are the Foundation Trilogy and the Three Laws of Robotics. What I want to be remembered for is no one book, or no dozen books. Any single thing I have written can be paralleled or even surpassed by something someone else has done. However, my total corpus for quantity, quality and variety can be duplicated by no one else. That is what I want to be remembered for.

"Introduction" to The Best of Isaac Asimov (1973)<!-- , p. ix -->
The Last Question (1956)
Contexte: "The Last Question" is my personal favorite, the one story I made sure would not be omitted from this collection. Why is it my favorite? For one thing I got the idea all at once and didn't have to fiddle with it; and I wrote it in white-heat and scarcely had to change a word. This sort of thing endears any story to any writer.
Then, too, it has had the strangest effect on my readers. Frequently someone writes to ask me if I can give them the name of a story, which they think I may have written, and tell them where to find it. They don't remember the title but when they describe the story it is invariably "The Last Question". This has reached the point where I recently received a long-distance phone call from a desperate man who began, "Dr. Asimov, there's a story I think you wrote, whose title I can't remember—" at which point I interrupted to tell him it was "The Last Question" and when I described the plot it proved to be indeed the story he was after. I left him convinced I could read minds at a distance of a thousand miles.
No other story I have written has anything like this effect on my readers — producing at once an unshakeable memory of the plot and an unshakeable forgettery of the title and even author. I think it may be that the story fills them so frighteningly full, that they can retain none of the side-issues.

The Casebook of the Black Widowers (1980), p. 177
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Contexte: When you write a short story... you had better know the ending first. The end of a story is only the end to the reader. To the writer, it's the beginning. If you don't know exactly where you're going every minute you're writing, you'll never get there — or anywhere.

"My Own View" in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1978) edited by Robert Holdstock; later published in Asimov on Science Fiction (1981)
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Source: I. Asimov

Source: Robots and Empire

Source: The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories

"The Tragedy of the Moon," The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (July 1972)
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Source: Short fiction, The Early Asimov Book One (1972), Half-Breed (p. 160)

Part IV, The Traders, section 1; originally published as “The Wedge” in Astounding (October 1944)
Source: The Foundation series (1951–1993), Foundation (1951)

"A Cult of Ignorance", Newsweek (21 January 1980) http://media.aphelis.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/ASIMOV_1980_Cult_of_Ignorance.pdf
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Contexte: There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

Source: Pebble in the Sky

Attributed in the "quote of the day" source code of the “Fortune” computer program (June 1987); more at "The Most Exciting Phrase in Science Is Not ‘Eureka!’ But ‘That’s funny …’" at Quote Investigator https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/03/02/eureka-funny/
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"Science Past, Science Future" (1975) p. 208
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Doctor Susan Calvin in "Robot Dreams" in Robot Dreams (1986)
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Contexte: There are limits beyond which your folly will not carry you. I am glad of that. In fact, I am relieved.

Source: I. Asimov: A Memoir (1994), Ch. 8, Library
Contexte: I received the fundamentals of my education in school, but that was not enough. My real education, the superstructure, the details, the true architecture, I got out of the public library. For an impoverished child whose family could not afford to buy books, the library was the open door to wonder and achievement, and I can never be sufficiently grateful that I had the wit to charge through that door and make the most of it.
Now, when I read constantly about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that the door is closing and that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.

" The Planet that Wasn't http://geobeck.tripod.com/frontier/planet.htm" originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (May 1975)
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Contexte: People are entirely too disbelieving of coincidence. They are far too ready to dismiss it and to build arcane structures of extremely rickety substance in order to avoid it. I, on the other hand, see coincidence everywhere as an inevitable consequence of the laws of probability, according to which having no unusual coincidence is far more unusual than any coincidence could possibly be.

Source: The Roving Mind (1983), Ch. 25
Contexte: How often people speak of art and science as though they were two entirely different things, with no interconnection. An artist is emotional, they think, and uses only his intuition; he sees all at once and has no need of reason. A scientist is cold, they think, and uses only his reason; he argues carefully step by step, and needs no imagination. That is all wrong. The true artist is quite rational as well as imaginative and knows what he is doing; if he does not, his art suffers. The true scientist is quite imaginative as well as rational, and sometimes leaps to solutions where reason can follow only slowly; if he does not, his science suffers.

Interview by Bill Moyers on Bill Moyers' World Of Ideas (21 October 1988); transcript http://www-tc.pbs.org/moyers/faithandreason/print/pdfs/woi%20asimov2.pdf (pages 5-6)
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Contexte: Science doesn't purvey absolute truth. Science is a mechanism. It's a way of trying to improve your knowledge of nature. It's a system for testing your thoughts against the universe and seeing whether they match. And this works, not just for the ordinary aspects of science, but for all of life. I should think people would want to know that what they know is truly what the universe is like, or at least as close as they can get to it.