The Book of Universes: Exploring the Limits of the Cosmos (2011)
Context: Continual miniaturisation allows resources to be conserved, efficiency to be increased, pollution to be reduced, and the remarkable flexibilities of the quantum world to be tapped. Very advanced civilizations elsewhere in the universe may have been force to follow the same technological path. Their nano-scale space probes, their atomic-scale machines and nano-computers, would be imperceptible to our course-grained surveys of the universe.... This may be the low-impact evolutionary path you need to follow in order to survive into the far, far future.<!--ch. 2, pp. 23-24
“Telepathy and intelligence appear to be incompatible from the evolutionary point of view—if you’ve got one, you don’t seem to need the other, and they may even be evolutionary enemies.”
Source: Short fiction, Midsummer Century (1972), Chapter 10 (p. 78)
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James Blish 30
American author 1921–1975Related quotes
http://ww.tufts.edu/home/feature/?p=commencement2007&p4=4
Speaking Out
Source: What is Anthropology? (2nd ed., 2017), Ch. 5 : Reciprocity
Source: The Dragons of Eden (1977), Chapter 2, “Genes and Brains” (p. 31)
Source: L’Expérience Intérieure (1943), p. 9
"Bushes and Ladders in Human Evolution", p. 61
Ever Since Darwin (1977)
“You’ve got the one thing a writer needs: You’ve got your own voice. Now go.”
Afterword to The Dud Avocado (2006)
Context: The Big Personalities weighed in. Soon after its publication Irwin Shaw wrote to me praising it. Terry Southern, calling me "Miss Smarts," said I was "a perfect darling." Gore Vidal phoned one morning saying, "You’ve got the one thing a writer needs: You’ve got your own voice. Now go." Ernest Hemingway said to me, "I liked your book. I liked the way your characters all speak differently." And then added, "My characters all sound the same because I never listen." All this, and heaven too. Laurence Olivier told me that now that my book was making a lot of money we could elope and I could support us. The Financial Times ran an item which read, "Such and such stock: No dud avocado." Groucho Marx wrote me, "I had to tell someone how much I enjoyed The Dud Avocado.… If this was actually your life, I don’t know how the hell you got through it." When people ask me how autobiographical the book is I say, all the impulsive, outrageous things my heroine does, I did. All the sensible things she did, I made up.