William Tenn Quotes

But now he had to have another look. It might not be so bad the second time. “It’s always darkest,” he told himself with determined triteness, “before the dawn.” And then found himself involuntarily adding, “Except on days when there’s an eclipse.”

“Take it easy, Fatty, and we'll be all right,” I told him with all the assurance of a bank robber trying to explain to the policeman who caught him that he was only trying to deposit his gun in the vault and the cashiers misunderstood him.

Don’t be bitter, young sir. If you want to go on living you have to be alert. And you can’t be alert and bitter at the same time.

They said you treated them very well, that you showed them as much respect as a thing like you could generate. They also said you cheated them."
"Oh, well, Theseus," Hebster spread his manicured hands. "I'm a businessman.

The delegate returned to tell his countrymen that the Americans, always notorious for their madness, had finally specialized in cretinism.

A man doesn’t volunteer for a hitch in hell just so he can knock off one of the devils.

Haven’t you ever heard it said that money isn’t everything, but that what it isn’t it can buy?

The human mind is lit by an elemental sense of wonder, a probing, restless curiosity that is our primate heritage and that from its beginnings has sought a knowledge, some knowledge, of the future. To satisfy that need there has come into being a massive and thoroughly modern creation, science fiction, the literature of extrapolative, industrial man.

He knew what the score was—and from here on out, he would be acting on what he knew rather than on what others told him.

Wh-who are you? And what do you want?"
"Joseph Burns, a poor but honest newspaperman." He considered for a moment. "Well, poor, anyway.

He reached into his soul for an article of fundamental faith, found it. “I can make money,” he quoted to himself. “That’s what I’m good for. That’s what I can always do.”

And there, right there, is the area in which science fiction leads the literary side of its life. It is the job of the science-fiction writer to take the utterly fantastic, if need be, and make it seem as real as a copy of today's tabloid newspaper folded to the sports section. To the extent that he succeeds in this he is a good science-fiction writer, and to the extent that he fails to make the story believable he is a bad one, be it ever so full of faster-than-light gimmicks and futuristic individuals with triple brains and mechanical genitalia.

It's a rough war, isn't it?"
I smiled back. "Rough? Why, if you're not careful, they tell me, you can get killed in it.

Irving Bommer looked like a man who had gone down into the Valley of the Shadow and had seen much more there to fear than such picayune things as Evil.

And, as a result of this examination," the forked pink beard smiled down gently from above, "the specialists discovered that what you call the human race was nonviable. That is, while the individuals composing it had strongly developed instincts of self-preservation, the species as a whole was suicidal."
"Suicidal!" I found myself breathing up with rest.
"Quite. This is a matter on which there can be little argument from the more honest among you. High civilization is a product of communal living and Man, in groups, has always tended to wipe himself out. In fact, a large factor in the development of what little civilization you do experience has been the rewards contingent upon the development of mass-destruction weapons.