“Today, life will offer me many lessons. I will learn nothing.”
April 18
Quotes from Daily Negations (2007)
“Today, life will offer me many lessons. I will learn nothing.”
April 18
Quotes from Daily Negations (2007)
“Science Fiction is the fiction of ideas.”
The Paris Review interview (2010)
Context: Science Fiction is the fiction of ideas. Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I’m borrowing energy from the ideas themselves. Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.
Source: Broca's Brain (1979), Chapter 9, “Science Fiction—A Personal View” (p. 166)
"William Shtner on Sci-Fi, Aging and the Environment" http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2017/08/22/in-the-magazine/shatner.html as interviewed by Jeanne Wolf, Saturday Evening Post, September/October 2017
As quoted in The Making of Kubrick's 2001 (1970) by Jerome Agel, p. 300
1970s
Context: One of the biggest roles of science fiction is to prepare people to accept the future without pain and to encourage a flexibility of mind. Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories. Two-thirds of 2001 is realistic — hardware and technology — to establish background for the metaphysical, philosophical, and religious meanings later.
“Yesterday's science fiction is today's prosaic, everyday reality.”
Letters to World Citizens (2004)
“Science fiction at its best should be crazy and dangerous, not sane and safe.”
Source: How To Write Science Fiction
“I have learned to smoke because I need something to hold onto.”
Source: By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept