James Nicoll Quotes

After enough concussions the head injuries blur together.

My grandfather for example only died twice, once during the war and once in the 1980s.

Deadly nightshade is the only plant I have ever been able to get to grow for me.

The [item] that was stolen [in the 1975 novel The Whenabouts of Burr] was the physical artifact the American Constitution, which has tremendous historical and symbolic significance, and not the legal and political framework also known as the American Constitution, which is a quaint relic of no relevance to the modern world.

A common issue with SF settings is that causally disconnected civilizations nevertheless are close enough in technological development that conflict is possible, rather than it being a matter of laser cannons against a thin film of single celled organisms.

It's a sad thing that the march of time and evolution of mores can rob one of the ability to laugh at simple domestic abuse.

The number of times I have been declared dead is statistically insignificant,although admittedly non-zero.

It's very difficult to convey how alien and horrifying accounts of how American health care works sound to a Canadian. Seriously, if I didn’t know they were real — if, for example, I didn't know an American reviewer who died because she had to choose between paying her mortgage or having a doctor investigate her incapacitating chest pains — it would seem like something from a particularly silly and Garbageman novel. About the only thing about the US that seems even less believable is the collective enthusiasm for frequent mass murders.

Romeo and Juliet *died*. I always liked that in a teen romance story.

[The cat] and I have an agreement: I leave her alone and don't make sudden moves when I wake up to find her perched on my chest, staring with an unblinking hostile gaze at my face and in return she rarely mutilates me.

Just as people in zombie apocalypses seem never to have seen a zombie apocalypse movie, so people in novels about the pioneering days of time travel never seem to have read novels on the subject.

I didn't skip the smut. The author went to the trouble of writing it, after all. I did not feel to make notes for possible application later on but I also never wondered if the author was a virgin raised in an abandoned hentai warehouse, which is always a possibility for modern pornographers and erotica writers.

Hell, Chuck Yeager could do it in his sleep while on fire, I'm sure.

Yes, I was surprised how easy it was to cut the door off my cat.

Alas, time and head injuries are stealing all my memories.