Larry Niven Quotes

I knew it long ago: I’m a compulsive teacher, but I can’t teach. The godawful state of today’s education system isn’t what’s stopping me. I lack at least two of the essential qualifications.
I cannot “suffer fools gladly.” The smartest of my pupils would get all my attention, and the rest would have to fend for themselves. And I can’t handle being interrupted.
Writing is the answer. Whatever I have to teach, my students will select themselves by buying the book. And nobody interrupts a printed page.

Writing is, therefore, both a form of compulsive behavior and, I frequently tell people, a self-induced form of mental illness. Those few writers who don’t start off by being a little nuts soon get that way as a direct result of their vocation.

Time is a one-way street with no parking spaces. You just have to keep going.

Ten thousand years wasn't enough...no lifetime was enough, unless you lived it in such a way as to make it enough.

A sufficiently intelligent being will look about her, solve all questions, then cease activity.

I’d thought my way into this mess. I should be able to think my way out, shouldn’t I?

Gambling was safer than war. More fun, too. Best of all, it gave him better odds.

“Do you play games of chance?”
“Emphatically yes. The process of living is a game of chance. To avoid chance is insanity.”

In a universe the size of ours almost anything that can happen, will.

“That’s impossible. Isn’t it? Carlos?”
Carlos’ mouth twisted. “Not if it’s being done.”

Peace isn’t a stable condition, not for us. Maybe not for anything that lives.

Anyone who says human nature can’t be changed is out of his head. To make it stick, he’s got to define human nature—and he can’t.

I asked him, “Do you know the difference between nude and naked?”
He shook his head.
“Nude is artistic. Naked is defenseless.”

There was this about him: he knew who I was, but he hadn’t remembered my name. Ron Cole had better things to think about than what name belonged with whom. A name was only a tag and a conversational gambit.

The morning was blacker than the inside of a smoker’s lungs.